The Soulbound Pact - RP

[Raparth]

It seemed infinitely harder, walking down the mountain. Three days ago, he had reached the top, or as near to it as one could be without entering the temple grounds. Three days of praying, fasting, meditating on the Immaculate texts. They had tested his limits, here on this cold mountain. And yet he was denied. The stairs twisted, turned, almost flowing down the mountainside like the streams he had tried to emulate. His muscles strained, but they were nothing compared to the torment in his heart. It was not three days he had waited, but years... decades of training under the eyes of the Immaculate Dragons. A lifetime spent seeking the closest thing to the grace of Exaltation that had been denied him. And yet he failed. Despair twisted his mind in ways that seemed to mock these holy grounds. Anger at himself and anger at those who had not helped him, those who had cast him down, those who surely laughed at his soul's desolation. Peleps Deled. He has received the grace of the Dragons and yet not I? He laughs at me, downcast, a faithful soul discarded because he does not find me worthy? Strength returned, hardened by bitterness, but it cost the monk his concentration. And the road to glories of the Dragons is not a path for the inattentive.

His foot slipped on a bit of the frozen rainwater, hiding in the shadow of the stone steps. Reflexes honed by years of training attempted to counter. They may even have overcome the obstacle of three days of exposure and fasting, but... The anger, bolstered by despair, turned his heel. Down went the bald man in ragged tunic, down went the mortal who dared question the decision of the Immaculate Dragons and their Chosen, down went the man who had forsaken all other identity for the name 'Student'... Limbs jumbled, bones broken, his body turned in the fall so that his head crashed on the last, bottommost, step. Eyes stared up, up the mountain path at the soaring temples of the Wyld Hunt, at the goal from which he had fallen so far, at the very embodiment of the mission he had so deeply failed...

The world darkened, the cold pressing down on him as his blood painted the snow. His heart beat slower, slower, trying to hold off the inevitable. His breath caught, escaping slowly out of blue and blood-splattered lips as his heart gave its last...

It is they that have failed you.

It all stopped. He stopped. Death itself stopped, as if waiting with bated breath. Instead of the Pinnacle of the Eye, he saw… Her. She was too short for a northerner, yet the mountain seemed so small in comparison. Her hair was pulled back harshly, bound behind her head with long hair sticks of a shimmering-black. Her skin was purest ivory, holding dark almond-shaped eyes that seemed to draw in his very soul. Her lips, the vibrant red of blood just split, matched her hair and stirred something in his lower chakras. Her voluptuous form was covered by a sleek dress the color of a starless night, its collar rising nearly to her chin. Five thin chains of jet lay around her neck and on her breast and seemed to be covered in some tiny inscriptions that he could not make out. Ashen prayer scrolls wove about her waist, shoulders, and arms, pulling the cloth closer still. A few scrolls eventually trailed loosely from her wrists and hips. The prayers, from what he could bring himself to see, were written in red and black and were the darkest blasphemies imaginable, calling the Dragons traitorous putrescent dogs and far worse.

I offer you the chance to continue. To exceed those who judged you unworthy. To cast down those who denied you.

“P-p-please…” He somehow coughed out the word.

You would give up your name, your destiny, and what is left of your life? You would serve me, until Creation itself dies?

“Y-yes,” it was easier this time, as if Death was ready to release its hold.

You would destroy the travesty of life and end this broken world?

The monk would say he paused, but time itself seemed to have cease its motion. To end Creation itself? To go against the Immaculate Dragons and their teachings? It would be a betrayal of everyth- Peleps Deled, his mind provided.

“I will,” said the student with strength and certainty.

Our pact is sealed. Arise.

And so he stood, body made whole, and knelt before his new master.

They ascended the mountain, though it felt as though a continued fall from the Dragons' Gaze. The student was glad for the separation, but as he followed the steps of his new Mistress, the degree of it came further into focus. The path was familiar to him, but it was not the one he had walked so recently. It twisted, precarious, as if the very black stones beneath his feet tried to throw him down. Just off the path, sometimes hidden in small openings or under piles of gravel, were twisted spirits. Ragged, raving ghosts with limbs torn or twisted into the crudest of weapons. A thin chain of obsidian links was shackled to their spine just behind the shoulders and would go out into the distance before sinking into the mountain itself. He imagined that they would have rushed him, their chains giving them just enough room to tear at his flesh with the very tips of their misbegotten limbs, were it not for Her. As She approached, they threw themselves to the ground, whispering blasphemous blessings upon her and making obscene offers for anything, up to and surpassing the souls of all their descendants, if she would but show them the mercy of Oblivion.

Eventually they rounded a large bend in the mountain, coming out where, in Creation, one would have been able to see the temple for the first time. Instead of a sacred temple to the Immaculate Dragons, there was a great fortress whose very appearance mocked the living. Instead of a holy house for the warriors who would seek out Anathema, there was a bastion of darkness and despair that made the distant Sun seem a child’s fairy tale. It was a monastery to the might of the fallen Creators, cyclopean stones of black marble with veins of red making manifest their majesty perfected past death itself. It was a fortress against the lies of hope and free will, cruelly exquisite spires and bladed towers telling the inevitable truth. It was a palace of the ultimate understanding that all things would end and, finally, even the Last would be consumed into nothingness, darkened windows of stained glass bearing witness to the Final Day. It was a graveyard on a scale he had never imagined possible, a necropolis of a lost Age where wonders beyond the Age of Sorrows were commonplace, a tomb that told of the brilliance and excess that had been cast down… and exceeded beyond the gate of mortality.

The Mistress and her devotee reached the top of the path, where the archway of a gate stood sealed by a wall so intricately carved it seemed to be hundreds of sculptures so interwoven that one could not see light beyond them. Around the very edges were scenes of the living, engaging in every act from sexual debauchery to ritualistic human sacrifice to all-out war. As the carvings neared the center, they became more and more extreme, more and more perfect in their corruption. There were lustful acts so grotesque they scratched at his mind, methods of torture so artistically perfected he could not guess at their methodology, acts of war that made one wonder how Creation had survived. In the center was a great five-petaled rose, at least a man’s height across. A stone chain began at five points around the edge of the whole sculpture, weaving in through the various figures, and each one coming to a particular petal. As he looked closer, it became clear that these were not petals… but rather cysts containing twisted figures reminiscent either of sleeping infants or perhaps the unborn… The Deathlord raised her hand and the entire construction began to shuffle and scrape, pulling itself upward to make a doorway. After years spent considering the greatest works of Immaculate artistry, each having grave mystic lessons hidden within it for the meticulous student, he had come to a not inconsiderable skill at finding the heart of such obscure records. The last detail he had seen before the wall pulled itself away was a slender hand in the heart of the flower, grasping the ends of all five chains.

A great courtyard opened up before them, almost bustling with the number of ghostly forces moving through it. There were at least five full phalanxes, all of which turned and saluted their arrived Liege. A series of great barks broke the silence, their timbre clawing as if to seep a cold fear into his bones. Two coal-black mastiffs, as tall at the shoulder as a Dynast’s warhorse and more than twice as wide, barreled around one of the squads, skittering to a stop before her and lowering their heads obediently, though flaming pale-green eyes seemed to consider him, as if pondering his edibility. One hand patted each of their heads absently, before the Mistress gestured a pair of stewards over.

Take and prepare him for our trip to Stygia. Send for Whisper of the Last Breath, Terror in the Shadow, and their newest students. They are to be in my throne room in one hour.

The stewards bowed as low as their corpus would allow, each muttering a soft “Yes, Mistress,” in response before surrounding the newest Abyssal and departing.

 

[Esbilon]

The first of the students to enter her Mistress's throne room is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Twice-Blind Sage Counselled By Carrion. Like the Deathlod who raised her high, the color of her hair leads the mind towards blood, but hers is dark, as if long-since dried, and her lips are as pale as those of a corpse. A great woolen cloak of dark grey fabric flows down her back, and upon each of her shoulders a raven blacker than a starless night rests, one's dead eyes take in everything in the room her own do not while the other whispers in her ear.

She is a tall woman, and muscled, when she walks forward, she projects all the confidence and majesty one would expect from a warrior-queen of the North. Once she has found her place in the room, she waits patiently for her Mistress to address her and reveal the purpose of her summons.

 

[Blackadder]

The Scribe was next, clasping a writing pen in his hand and a ledger held under the arm. He wore unadorned plain robes, matched with neatly trimmed hair that had darkened to black by his transformation. His body, still held a slight rotundness, the lingering consequences of a sedentary life not completely erased by the Abyssal Exaltation.

Like the Sage, he too arrived and waited in patient silence.

 

[Vivisector]

Swift, silent steps brought Dissolution to her destination. Her latest experiments had been left to congeal in their glass tubes without her careful eye to observe them. Despite the blank expression on her ash-gray face, the flaring of her long, black, oilcloth coat betrayed her agitation. The only thing that allowed Dissolution to swiftly dispel her anger was the nature of the summons. The Mistress wouldn't call upon her without reason, something that made this interruption easier to swallow. While she disdained any sort of distraction from her Great Work, Dissolution understood that sometimes such things were unavoidable; she did her best to take this in stride.

Dissolution slowed her pace as she entered the throne room. Her cloudy, corpse-white eyes swept slowly over the room's occupants. She hazarded a guess that this meeting was of some importance. With any luck it would be both swift and without any pointless politicking.

The Child of Bone paused near the other Deathknights. She stood straight and still, her lean six-foot frame resembling a dread statue more than a body made of inferior flesh. In life she may have been beautiful, but her Last Breath had taken away the blush of life and gifted her with the horrid allure of death. There was no doubt in her mind that the deadly snows of Nexus had influenced her dramatic transformation. Dissolution found a macabre beauty in such thoughts, knowing that such a virulent substance had forever changed her. After all, who better to bring Creation to its knees under the throes of wicked plagues than a creature infused with disease itself?

 

[Raparth]

The doors of the Great Hall were huge yet delicate, massive wings that would swing with perfect ease and quiet whenever they opened yet would be as irresistible as death to those who had not given leave to enter. In stark relief over the soulsteel, the whole of the Underworld was represented, small lines spreading out in a web under each location, connecting each place to Stygia and the Mouth below it. They glided open as the Chosen of the Void approached. The Great Hall held numerous large vertical windows, each stained with blood, ash, and bile to the appropriate shade and displayed scenes of most magnificent death, whether from plague, slaughter, or other means. The ribs within the room evoked the elegant flying buttresses without, though these were a tarnished silver to the black marble outside. Five-armed candelabras offered steady illumination, though the pyre flame did not consume either the five red candles nor the larger central black. The velvet carpet beneath one's feet was so dark that it seemed they walked upon Nothing itself. At the end the thirteen sets of windows, candelabras, and ribs, opened into the circular room that held the throne, though it was separated by no doors from the rest of the hall. Around its perimeter were five equally-spaced windows of several magnitudes grander, in both size, content, and quality, of those that had come before. The throne itself was a simple curule chair of the rare Black Ash wood, lacking a back as was the oldest style. Surely for any other it would have been uncomfortable or even painful to sit upon, yet the Keeper of Most Forbidden Truths made it as grand a throne as if it was the Scarlet Empress' own.

As the first deathknights arrived, their Mistress gave them only the slightest nod of acknowledgement. When the appointed time arrived, the clockwork marvel that sat at the apex of the Chapterhouse tolled. The hour struck, not with a sound, but with the cold caress on each soul within earshot that reminded them of the hour of their own death and the inevitability of their second. The doors of swung open and the remaining Chosen entered. At their forefront was Terror in Shadow, who had taken for herself the name Alegra after her Last Breath. She was a few inches short of six feet, but the massive soulsteel armor over her powerful physique made her much larger. The pauldrons were huge fanged skulls were polished to an argent sheen. The breastplate was styled to be an overly large ribcage, each "bone" bearing a dark tiding of Oblivion's inexorable progress. Every edge was fine and the practice yard had demonstrated how easily even the gauntlets could cut through corpus. As always, her armor was absolutely silent, something that was unnerving when seen in combat, the plate consuming the sound of every blow. Alegra wore no helmet, so her pale features were clear. She was no great beauty, like the Keeper or even the Ivory Abbess, but she had a look of strength and honesty that made a man want to trust. Her porcelain skin and the bone-white hair pulled back into a soldier's knot might have made one question, but her eyes... irises the exact color of a barghest's flaming breath, made one certain she was unearthly. Across her back lay Last Laugh, a massive scythe with a blade they'd overheard one of the servants saying was forged from ores extracted from the Tombs of the Neverborn themselves. Though the handle seemed to be soulsteel, that blade... it was a shape cut from the world, a blackness from which there was no reflection.

Trailing her was Whisper of the Last Breath, made much smaller by comparison. He was not likely a tall man in life, and Death had withered his form, now stooped beneath his black robes of crush velvet. Whisper moved with uneven jerks, as if each movement caused pain, but did not slow. When they reached the other deathknights and knelt before their Deathlord, the Daybreak's body creaked audibly.

Terror in Shadow looked up after a moment, "What would you have of us, Mistress?"

The Deathlord's dark eyes appraising the newest deathknights as she responded, Your students have learned well the lessons of body, mind, and essence. Like a blade well-forged, they must now be tested. They will be honed by the experienced or shattered by their failure. You will outfit them for their journey and then will seek out the Vicar of Despair Ecstatic and Liberating and the Love-lorn Censor of Promises Lost Into the Mouth of the Void. They are maneuvering the Tear Eaters against the League. You will take a regiment and ensure they make no significant gains. Now go and prepare yourselves. As soon as these disciples depart, so too will you.

The Dusk slammed clenched fist against her heart, though its silence was overcome by the gentle whisper of the Daybreak. "As you wish, Majesty." They both stood and departed, leaving Death's younger Lawgivers behind.

The Mistress of Soul-Bound Pacts Written in Blood smiled softly, though its comfort might seem to some to be more unsettling than the horrors elsewhere in the land of the dead.
You have done well, my children. Well indeed. You are ready to prove your power, your cunning, and your determination. The foundations beneath the satrapy of Medo have begun to erode, although few realize it yet. The distraction of the Realm, the distrust of the satrap, and the discontent of the natives all lead towards a problematic future. Once a resident understands the decay of their home, however, they may be quick to repair it. The deterioration must be made to serve our purposes. Many small fires may starve the inferno. You will ensure that the rot is not detected, that Medo stands on the brink, but falls only upon my command. When it does, we will be ready to make use of its remains.

In the greatest pass through these Almaj Mountains, lies the bastion of Karasch, surrounded by shadowlands from both wars and massacres. For centuries, both the living and the dead of Karasch have guarded the pass. The dead have long relied on Underworld trade and living sacrifices to fund their defenses, but they are steadily losing the fight against the things that bubble up from the Labyrinth. You could offer to aid them, in return for their sworn fealty, or pursue another course, but remember Karasch is only one stone in the foundation of Medo.

Her eyes slowly drifted across her Chosen, seeming to look deep into each. I tell you of my desires for Medo, because it is up to you to ensure they come to pass. You will demonstrate your worthiness to me not merely by following orders, but also understanding and mastering the obstacles before you. I require only these things: First, Medo will serve me in its life or death, should I give the command; and Second, the living will not know of me until I choose.

 

[Esbilon]

At the mention of the land she called home while she still drew breath, Sage's hand grip more firmly around the cursed blade at her side, but make no other outward sign of the turmoil going on behind her piercing eyes.

As the Keeper finishes speaking, she bows low and whispers "yes, Mistress," in response, certain that the Deathlord will hear her words none the less clearly for their softness.

 

[Vivisector]

Structured and surreptitious destabilization? That sounded like the work of courtiers and assassins, of which Dissolution was neither. She'd have to find some way to be useful. Ideally, her Great Work would progress simultaneously, even if by only the tiniest of steps. Progress was progress, after all. Behind her corpse-like eyes whirled a mind as sharp as any chirurgeon's knife. Disease can take a long time to manifest, though it could be unreliable given time between infection and the appearance of symptoms. Perhaps a study of current, local afflictions? Yes, selecting one to raise into an epidemic at the right moment could be useful. Under the auspices of tender ministration Dissolution could move among the ill and dying, securing samples and collecting information could prove fruitful. Though Dissolution would prefer to send the whole of Medo into the throes of virulent plagues and observe the results, such an illuminating act would not advance the Keeper's goals and that, undoubtedly, would lead to Dissolution losing her research resources and funding. That would not do.

But she was getting ahead of herself. First and foremost the Abyssal physician would need to study and observe. Learning of past outbreaks and current contagions would further both her and her Mistress' goal at the same time. With a few field tests it should be possible to discern which disease would be most efficient in case widespread infection became necessary. Then, at the Keeper's whim, a plague could spread. With Dissolution's knowledge of not just treating but also neutralizing disease, it could just as readily be halted.

Who needs courtiers and assassins, anyway?

 

[Black Prophet Legacy]

Many would have thought it's pressence a mere statue, however these Death Lords knew it to be one of there own. The Soul-Steel skeleton of Vixthrall Bonestrider, Cradle of the Illgotten would make a poor art install. The soul-steel feet stood just wear the stones of the floor changed color, and his black and grey speckled steel had a friendly shine to it in this light. The large teardrop belly gave him a pear shaped silhouette that seamed very ungainly. This "cradle" was the heart of the beast itself and housed his master Cingetissa the Ashen Sprout.

Exiting the Hall Cingetissa took a moment to think on the Mistress' words. Many of the other Deathlords thought it very strange that the Mistress would give the Black Exaltation to an infant, but now would be it's chance to show it's worth.