Post by stephena on May 8, 2022 12:50:52 GMT
And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest day and night…
Revelation 14:11
CW: religious iconography and extreme violence
Sorrell sat watch with Jackal. They stared into the night in silence for what seemed like hours. Nothing moved. All was still. Eventually Sorrel plucked up the courage to speak.
“Are we doing well?” she half turned to look at him. “Are we winning?”
Jackal sat so still she wondered if he’d heard her. Then his deep voice rumbled to life.
“There are no winners in war. There may be a side with fewer dead.”
“But there are innocents who aren’t dead yet,” Sorrel persisted. “Are we in a good place to save any of them?”
“We have already lost innocents,” Jackal growled. “Losing any innocent is losing.”
Sorrel nodded. This line of questioning was failing to strike up the comradely banter she’d been hoping for. She tried a different tack.
“Are the words helpful?” she waited and when no answer came, she elaborated. “The words Zola heard in her dream - chain, whip, pyre, betrayer…”
“Do you mean – do I think they carry any meaning to the situation we are currently in?” Jackal’s eyes flickered slightly but he didn’t turn towards her.
“Well, yes, that was the question, I suppose,” Sorrel trailed off.
“No,” his voice so low she felt rather than heard it. She thought that was all he was going to say then he sighed and looked at her at last. “They were created by a fashion designer in Hell. They might mean something. They might just mean whip, pyre… yada yada.”
Sorrel chewed on this for a while.
“Is there anything I can do better?” she ventured.
“Don’t fuck a devil.”
“Well, I didn’t,” she was slightly indignant.
“It’s a metaphor,” he shot back. She looked dubious. “Everyone has weak points,” he explained tersely. “Don’t sell us out.”
They sat in silence again.
“I might just go over and check the… over there,” Sorrel scrambled to her feet.
“Good idea,” the nearest the Jackal had ever come to praising her felt like he was saying fuck off.
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night
She sat on the other side of the party and her eyes roved over her sleeping companions. Zola – so complicated. Cynic, romantic, detached, passionate… one of the finest blades she’d ever seen fight and a seething power that had saved them so many times. She felt the paladin's confusion and doubt and she remembered the day she’d cannoned into her and Marto in the square outside the temple… both of them had agreed on the spot to join her. That very night poor Marto had been the first to be branded.
She watched the halfling knight as he slept, his face so animated she could swear he was talking to someone. She regretted bringing up his nakedness in the strange group dream. There was something beyond her understanding in his attraction and repulsion to that muscular himbo Adhyël. And yet the conflict only seemed to inflame his courage.
Finally, her eyes found Velania. She remembered her first week in Kantas, how she had stumbled off the boat with no clear purpose beyond distancing herself from her past and no trace of anything but fear and violence in her soul. Velania had settled and centred her and with Seraphina given her broken spirit a feeling of hope and reignited her love for the goddess.
She recalled their first battle together in the Feywild – how Velania’s magic had been repelled by the shadow, but she had stepped forward not back. And then, in the ruined tomb, when two fiends had turned their attention to her, how she had blossomed into an angel and risen above them like a conqueror.
And what of Sorrel Darkfire, she thought bitterly. What a catalyst she turned out to be. Running back to the temple and pacing its floors fruitlessly. Since then she had not acquitted herself nobly. Wasted arrows, empty conversations… Perhaps the moonmaiden had reached out to her merely as an emissary, a recruiting sergeant.
She sat in the darkness as her watch passed, her eyes on the dark woods around her and a bitter tune on a broken loop at the back of her mind. “I have travelled long and far, and my eyes find normal such things as most folk have not seen in their darkest nightmares,” she reflected. The words to Halor’s Lament found her, a House favourite on maudlin evenings of funeral songs and eulogies, and her heart sang:
My bow is not as light as it used to be.
My flag is not as pure as it ought to be.
I am not as my lover would have me be.
But I am who I am and that’s all I’ll be.
I have fought the Devil at the gates of hell
I have danced with horror and lived to tell
I held my nerve, waved death farewell
Then you broke my heart, sweet mademoiselle
My pack is heavy in the endless gloom
Folk fall silent when I enter the room
And yet these words will be carved on my tomb
“Died for love, the fool’s last doom.”
Lying Out There Like a Killer in the Sun
The fight was weird. First the silence. They’d stumbled into Snowey who was looking for them – Mystra had a dog in the race it seemed. Then the animals vanished. Standard. Something any soldier notices after their third or fourth ambush. Jackal pulled out his greatsword and Khaos winked out.
The Fiendish Archer appeared on the edge of the crevasse, looking down on them. Sorrel cursed. Basic error, no flanking. They were as vulnerable as a line of cavalry.
Then the scorpion blocked their path. Zola tried to ride it down, but the thing was more than just a scuttling killer. Zola was down, paralysed.
Sorrel loosed off three arrows at the archer, noting with grim satisfaction how they all hit home, then reached deep into her fey blood and called her sisters. The two dire wolves sniffed her curiously. “Save her, the paladin,” she pointed. They bounded forward, jaws slavering.
Snowey hurled bolts of light up at the archer and Marto blinked next to it, slicing and dicing with astonishing speed.
Then Velania took an arrow, and it was clear this was not just a simple shaft. Something deadly started eating into her.
Jackal joined the wolves and Zola broke free of the fiendish magic to bring two might blows down on the thing. Velania was up, her wings spread, holy fire leaping from her then Snowey…
Sorrel couldn’t quite work out what happened next.
She saw the scorpion roll over, dead, with Zola’s blades buried deep in its belly.
She felt the arrow strike home and its dark power break her bond with her sisters.
And then, as Snowey sent bolts of force into the archer, one of them seemed to flicker wildly and spread out into a wide circle before scooping up one of her sisters and…
And there was a flying wolf over the battlefield.
Which was no longer a battlefield. Or at least, not technically.
“What the fuck do you lot want?” a woman’s voice came out of nowhere.
‘We’ve come looking for the oracle or whatever you call it,” Jackal sighed. “The keeper of the thing.”
“You mean the Waking Dreamer?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Suddenly they were surrounded. Heavily armed soldiers, weapons drawn, outnumbered them five to one.
“She’ll want to see us,” Jackal’s voice was flat, cold.
“The other guys were here, and they were pretty shitty,” the woman grumbled, “You presumably are the moon people. They were dicks. You gonna be dicks?”
“We are not dicks,” Jackal’s tone brooked no argument.
Sorrel’s dire wolf floated gracefully overhead, its features serene in the setting sun.
“What’s that wolf doing?” the woman was incredulous. “Who would using flying magic on an innocent creature?”
“Maybe we’re a little bit dickish,” Sorrel confessed. “But only by accident.”
The Ghosts in the Eyes of All the Boys You Sent Away
The camp was… a camp. The crate, the weapons, the tents. Mainly mercenaries, Sorrel reckoned. A few true believers in the Balance or the Dreamer but mainly paid muscle. Then She came out a tent and Sorrel’s knees went a little weak.
“I am Themis, regarded with disdain by both camps,” the Total Babe of a Tiefling said. Not by my camp, love, Sorrel thought. “I am one of the Unending. Our purpose is that the battle between Selune and Shar is a rift that cannot be mended.”
Everyone started arguing with her and the debate could have gone on forever if she hadn’t whipped out a very impressive blade and handed it to Zola who seemed weirdly unhappy with the gift, Sorrel thought. It was like she was going to have to do something awful with it.
Then shit got real.
All the Promises Broken
The Babe asked Jackal for something. He snorted. Walked to a bowl on a table, took out a dagger, sliced open his palm. Looked at her as he bled into the sacrificial bowl. She dipped her hands in his blood. Sat down. Head tilted backwards, hands up, fingers splayed.
Khaos reached out and laced their fingers with hers.
They were thrown up hundreds of feet, thousands of feet, miles into the sky. The Babe spoke.
“The time of blades and ash is come. The High Diviner will be lost. Deceit will befall him. And only when he is in utmost peril can he be truly protected.
The time of blades and ash is come. The Twins will cross. The sisters will dance once more on the banks of the Azellah.
The time of blades and ash is come. Souls will be torn in two. Flesh made solid at last as the Zealots bleed in the Fourth.
The sky will tear under great, beating wings. The fallen ones will rise. Rise higher than ever before. In the time of Blades and Ash.”
Sorrel could see Daring Heights, into the temple of Selune. Rholor and Melissa were arguing a point of theology. They heard something and rushed outside to find…
To find horror unleashed in the streets and Hell at play.
Sorrel gasped and nearly cried out as she saw citizens fighting tooth and nail, randomly attacking, biting and tearing at each other. Gangs dragged victims to the ground and tore them apart. Families turned on each other, punching, kicking and stamping. The blood, the screams...
The Devil was loose in Daring Heights.
Rholor stood at the top of the temple stairs and cried out for calm. He began a low chant, calling on Selûne to restrain the madness infesting these innocents.
Behind him, impossibly, Melissa’s eyes glowed red, she plucked a dagger from her robes and plunged it into his spine.
Sorrel wept, her folly revealed. She had believed in Melissa, believed in Jackal and had deserted her post. She was the worst of soldiers. She had failed in the one task she had been charged with.
Melissa’s skin began to blister and seemed to boil from within, melting away as Rahmiël appeared from inside her, delirious and exalted. Her claws enveloped the High Diviner and the pair swirled into oblivion.
Gradually the fighting ceased.
Melissa stumbled out of the temple looking for Rholor.
Blink.
They were back in the camp.
Sorrel turned on Jackal, about to scream at him but he was stalking away, praying with an unholy venom. It was an argument rather than a devotion - resentful, conflicted.
Khaos spoke in her mind. Enough We go now. It will take us days.
Velania was kneeling on the ground, her head in her hands. She raised a tear streaked face to Themis and whispered “When will this happen?”
“It has happened,” Themis replied, cold and unmoved. “He was taken. Tonight. To Phelegethos, child.”
Sorrel’s hands twitched at her sword hilt. Themis had told the fiends this first. She had caused it to happen.
Snowey spoke up. "We may not share the same faith,” she told Themis. “But I admire your belief. You have such patience and diligence to bear witness to an endless cycle, it is impressive dedication. Thank you for your help.”
Sorrel bit her tongue and forced her hand away from her blade.
You people, she wanted to howl. You have caused this. You, Themis, with your careless disregard for innocent lives. You, Jackal, with your flawed plan. But most of all, you, Sorrel Darkfire, for deserting your post. You are the worst of soldiers – you walked away in search of cheap glory and high adventure. Jackal allowed you to escape the boredom of your appointed task and you accepted him gratefully. You are culpable above all others, and you must put things right or die.
As of this moment, you have no honour. You have no right to live. You must travel to Phelegethos and if you cannot save the High Diviner, you must remain there and receive the greatest of punishments reserved for traitors and cowards and those that desert their duty, buried forever in the deepest circle of Hell.
At every mouth his teeth a sinner champ'd
Bruis'd as with pond'rous engine, so that three
Were in this guise tormented. But far more
Than from that gnawing, was the foremost pang'd
By the fierce rending, whence ofttimes the back
Was stript of all its skin.
Inferno, Canto 34, Dante Alighieri
Revelation 14:11
CW: religious iconography and extreme violence
Sorrell sat watch with Jackal. They stared into the night in silence for what seemed like hours. Nothing moved. All was still. Eventually Sorrel plucked up the courage to speak.
“Are we doing well?” she half turned to look at him. “Are we winning?”
Jackal sat so still she wondered if he’d heard her. Then his deep voice rumbled to life.
“There are no winners in war. There may be a side with fewer dead.”
“But there are innocents who aren’t dead yet,” Sorrel persisted. “Are we in a good place to save any of them?”
“We have already lost innocents,” Jackal growled. “Losing any innocent is losing.”
Sorrel nodded. This line of questioning was failing to strike up the comradely banter she’d been hoping for. She tried a different tack.
“Are the words helpful?” she waited and when no answer came, she elaborated. “The words Zola heard in her dream - chain, whip, pyre, betrayer…”
“Do you mean – do I think they carry any meaning to the situation we are currently in?” Jackal’s eyes flickered slightly but he didn’t turn towards her.
“Well, yes, that was the question, I suppose,” Sorrel trailed off.
“No,” his voice so low she felt rather than heard it. She thought that was all he was going to say then he sighed and looked at her at last. “They were created by a fashion designer in Hell. They might mean something. They might just mean whip, pyre… yada yada.”
Sorrel chewed on this for a while.
“Is there anything I can do better?” she ventured.
“Don’t fuck a devil.”
“Well, I didn’t,” she was slightly indignant.
“It’s a metaphor,” he shot back. She looked dubious. “Everyone has weak points,” he explained tersely. “Don’t sell us out.”
They sat in silence again.
“I might just go over and check the… over there,” Sorrel scrambled to her feet.
“Good idea,” the nearest the Jackal had ever come to praising her felt like he was saying fuck off.
Show a little faith, there’s magic in the night
She sat on the other side of the party and her eyes roved over her sleeping companions. Zola – so complicated. Cynic, romantic, detached, passionate… one of the finest blades she’d ever seen fight and a seething power that had saved them so many times. She felt the paladin's confusion and doubt and she remembered the day she’d cannoned into her and Marto in the square outside the temple… both of them had agreed on the spot to join her. That very night poor Marto had been the first to be branded.
She watched the halfling knight as he slept, his face so animated she could swear he was talking to someone. She regretted bringing up his nakedness in the strange group dream. There was something beyond her understanding in his attraction and repulsion to that muscular himbo Adhyël. And yet the conflict only seemed to inflame his courage.
Finally, her eyes found Velania. She remembered her first week in Kantas, how she had stumbled off the boat with no clear purpose beyond distancing herself from her past and no trace of anything but fear and violence in her soul. Velania had settled and centred her and with Seraphina given her broken spirit a feeling of hope and reignited her love for the goddess.
She recalled their first battle together in the Feywild – how Velania’s magic had been repelled by the shadow, but she had stepped forward not back. And then, in the ruined tomb, when two fiends had turned their attention to her, how she had blossomed into an angel and risen above them like a conqueror.
And what of Sorrel Darkfire, she thought bitterly. What a catalyst she turned out to be. Running back to the temple and pacing its floors fruitlessly. Since then she had not acquitted herself nobly. Wasted arrows, empty conversations… Perhaps the moonmaiden had reached out to her merely as an emissary, a recruiting sergeant.
She sat in the darkness as her watch passed, her eyes on the dark woods around her and a bitter tune on a broken loop at the back of her mind. “I have travelled long and far, and my eyes find normal such things as most folk have not seen in their darkest nightmares,” she reflected. The words to Halor’s Lament found her, a House favourite on maudlin evenings of funeral songs and eulogies, and her heart sang:
My bow is not as light as it used to be.
My flag is not as pure as it ought to be.
I am not as my lover would have me be.
But I am who I am and that’s all I’ll be.
I have fought the Devil at the gates of hell
I have danced with horror and lived to tell
I held my nerve, waved death farewell
Then you broke my heart, sweet mademoiselle
My pack is heavy in the endless gloom
Folk fall silent when I enter the room
And yet these words will be carved on my tomb
“Died for love, the fool’s last doom.”
Lying Out There Like a Killer in the Sun
The fight was weird. First the silence. They’d stumbled into Snowey who was looking for them – Mystra had a dog in the race it seemed. Then the animals vanished. Standard. Something any soldier notices after their third or fourth ambush. Jackal pulled out his greatsword and Khaos winked out.
The Fiendish Archer appeared on the edge of the crevasse, looking down on them. Sorrel cursed. Basic error, no flanking. They were as vulnerable as a line of cavalry.
Then the scorpion blocked their path. Zola tried to ride it down, but the thing was more than just a scuttling killer. Zola was down, paralysed.
Sorrel loosed off three arrows at the archer, noting with grim satisfaction how they all hit home, then reached deep into her fey blood and called her sisters. The two dire wolves sniffed her curiously. “Save her, the paladin,” she pointed. They bounded forward, jaws slavering.
Snowey hurled bolts of light up at the archer and Marto blinked next to it, slicing and dicing with astonishing speed.
Then Velania took an arrow, and it was clear this was not just a simple shaft. Something deadly started eating into her.
Jackal joined the wolves and Zola broke free of the fiendish magic to bring two might blows down on the thing. Velania was up, her wings spread, holy fire leaping from her then Snowey…
Sorrel couldn’t quite work out what happened next.
She saw the scorpion roll over, dead, with Zola’s blades buried deep in its belly.
She felt the arrow strike home and its dark power break her bond with her sisters.
And then, as Snowey sent bolts of force into the archer, one of them seemed to flicker wildly and spread out into a wide circle before scooping up one of her sisters and…
And there was a flying wolf over the battlefield.
Which was no longer a battlefield. Or at least, not technically.
“What the fuck do you lot want?” a woman’s voice came out of nowhere.
‘We’ve come looking for the oracle or whatever you call it,” Jackal sighed. “The keeper of the thing.”
“You mean the Waking Dreamer?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Suddenly they were surrounded. Heavily armed soldiers, weapons drawn, outnumbered them five to one.
“She’ll want to see us,” Jackal’s voice was flat, cold.
“The other guys were here, and they were pretty shitty,” the woman grumbled, “You presumably are the moon people. They were dicks. You gonna be dicks?”
“We are not dicks,” Jackal’s tone brooked no argument.
Sorrel’s dire wolf floated gracefully overhead, its features serene in the setting sun.
“What’s that wolf doing?” the woman was incredulous. “Who would using flying magic on an innocent creature?”
“Maybe we’re a little bit dickish,” Sorrel confessed. “But only by accident.”
The Ghosts in the Eyes of All the Boys You Sent Away
The camp was… a camp. The crate, the weapons, the tents. Mainly mercenaries, Sorrel reckoned. A few true believers in the Balance or the Dreamer but mainly paid muscle. Then She came out a tent and Sorrel’s knees went a little weak.
“I am Themis, regarded with disdain by both camps,” the Total Babe of a Tiefling said. Not by my camp, love, Sorrel thought. “I am one of the Unending. Our purpose is that the battle between Selune and Shar is a rift that cannot be mended.”
Everyone started arguing with her and the debate could have gone on forever if she hadn’t whipped out a very impressive blade and handed it to Zola who seemed weirdly unhappy with the gift, Sorrel thought. It was like she was going to have to do something awful with it.
Then shit got real.
All the Promises Broken
The Babe asked Jackal for something. He snorted. Walked to a bowl on a table, took out a dagger, sliced open his palm. Looked at her as he bled into the sacrificial bowl. She dipped her hands in his blood. Sat down. Head tilted backwards, hands up, fingers splayed.
Khaos reached out and laced their fingers with hers.
They were thrown up hundreds of feet, thousands of feet, miles into the sky. The Babe spoke.
“The time of blades and ash is come. The High Diviner will be lost. Deceit will befall him. And only when he is in utmost peril can he be truly protected.
The time of blades and ash is come. The Twins will cross. The sisters will dance once more on the banks of the Azellah.
The time of blades and ash is come. Souls will be torn in two. Flesh made solid at last as the Zealots bleed in the Fourth.
The sky will tear under great, beating wings. The fallen ones will rise. Rise higher than ever before. In the time of Blades and Ash.”
Sorrel could see Daring Heights, into the temple of Selune. Rholor and Melissa were arguing a point of theology. They heard something and rushed outside to find…
To find horror unleashed in the streets and Hell at play.
Sorrel gasped and nearly cried out as she saw citizens fighting tooth and nail, randomly attacking, biting and tearing at each other. Gangs dragged victims to the ground and tore them apart. Families turned on each other, punching, kicking and stamping. The blood, the screams...
The Devil was loose in Daring Heights.
Rholor stood at the top of the temple stairs and cried out for calm. He began a low chant, calling on Selûne to restrain the madness infesting these innocents.
Behind him, impossibly, Melissa’s eyes glowed red, she plucked a dagger from her robes and plunged it into his spine.
Sorrel wept, her folly revealed. She had believed in Melissa, believed in Jackal and had deserted her post. She was the worst of soldiers. She had failed in the one task she had been charged with.
Melissa’s skin began to blister and seemed to boil from within, melting away as Rahmiël appeared from inside her, delirious and exalted. Her claws enveloped the High Diviner and the pair swirled into oblivion.
Gradually the fighting ceased.
Melissa stumbled out of the temple looking for Rholor.
Blink.
They were back in the camp.
Sorrel turned on Jackal, about to scream at him but he was stalking away, praying with an unholy venom. It was an argument rather than a devotion - resentful, conflicted.
Khaos spoke in her mind. Enough We go now. It will take us days.
Velania was kneeling on the ground, her head in her hands. She raised a tear streaked face to Themis and whispered “When will this happen?”
“It has happened,” Themis replied, cold and unmoved. “He was taken. Tonight. To Phelegethos, child.”
Sorrel’s hands twitched at her sword hilt. Themis had told the fiends this first. She had caused it to happen.
Snowey spoke up. "We may not share the same faith,” she told Themis. “But I admire your belief. You have such patience and diligence to bear witness to an endless cycle, it is impressive dedication. Thank you for your help.”
Sorrel bit her tongue and forced her hand away from her blade.
You people, she wanted to howl. You have caused this. You, Themis, with your careless disregard for innocent lives. You, Jackal, with your flawed plan. But most of all, you, Sorrel Darkfire, for deserting your post. You are the worst of soldiers – you walked away in search of cheap glory and high adventure. Jackal allowed you to escape the boredom of your appointed task and you accepted him gratefully. You are culpable above all others, and you must put things right or die.
As of this moment, you have no honour. You have no right to live. You must travel to Phelegethos and if you cannot save the High Diviner, you must remain there and receive the greatest of punishments reserved for traitors and cowards and those that desert their duty, buried forever in the deepest circle of Hell.
At every mouth his teeth a sinner champ'd
Bruis'd as with pond'rous engine, so that three
Were in this guise tormented. But far more
Than from that gnawing, was the foremost pang'd
By the fierce rending, whence ofttimes the back
Was stript of all its skin.
Inferno, Canto 34, Dante Alighieri
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