Auct,(...) the month of growth, 221 A.D. I knelt upon the table of Isoth, gripping its edges tightly as the blood stormed within me, human and inhuman, churning together, boiling without heat.(...) Their voices dissolved into me, a delirium of hope and fear, a chorus of prayers now severed from the gods. Their faces flickered like fading candles and lands rolled past behind my eyes.
The sounds and sights of cities rose within, some that I knew, others unlike anything I'd seen before.(...) I was falling, though the table held me, falling through sights and sounds and smells, through warmth that flooded every particle of my being. "Alaric, Alaric." From a vast distance a faint voice spoke.(...) I could not discern its words. "Get up, Grand Inquisitor." The sound of many feet came also from afar,(...) met feet slapping against stone floors. "Move."
I focused as best I could on the voice. "Amarax?" I said aloud, my own voice sounding so far away. "Yes, now get out of there." "Can you feel it?" "Now is not the time, Alric." "Everything is going to be all right." "No, it isn't. Not if you don't get off that table and move." "This table?" I looked down at the table, (...) marveling at its craftsmanship, whose details seemed so much sharper to my eyes. "Did you know that this is a map?"(...) "Yes."
Now the sound of wet feet had grown to the sound of moist flesh, of so many bodies shambling from all sides. I lowered myself so that my face hovered just above the Beltlands. "I was born here." Dozens of dead men poured into the room
with me. Their bodies were in various states of decay, some being recently dead and mostly intact, others missing limbs or riddled with holes, barely strung together by putrid sinew.(...) They carried a variety of weapons, spears, and clubs, and swords, just as broken and decayed as those that wielded them. For a moment, they stared at me with glassy eyes. My body brought itself to its feet and still the blood stormed within.
"You still have time. They're waiting for a command.(...) The liche probably doesn't know." "Shall we dance?" "What?" I lifted one foot from the table and the heads of six dead men cracked open, struck in nearly instant sequence by six Alarics. My foot returned to the table before the black fluids from their broken skulls splattered to the ground. Their bodies, however, did not fall. "You can't kill them, Alarec." "Is that a challenge?" "No!" The dead men rushed at me then, rushed at
where I used to be. I watched through the warmth of my blood trance as so many Alarics darted in and out of the horde, striking from all sides.(...) One of the Alarics stole a sword, and then all of the Alarics wielded it. The dead swung their arms, but as a blade would pierce into one Alaric, his image would blur out of place, reappearing in an instant behind his attacker and dismembering him in a flicker of movement. Before long, the room was piled with arms and legs and
torsos and heads. No dead men were left standing except myself. "You were saying?" "They are no more dead than they already were.(...) Semantics, all you've done is alerted Deadhaus to our position." "Shouldn't you be telling me where to go then?" There was no answer for a moment, a brief loss of words from the liche, but he resumed his navigational duties soon enough, saying nothing more of the
matter. I went as mist, as did my stolen sword, slipping past patrols of the dead, who seemed unable to recognize me in this form.(...) I flowed through massive stone corridors until I reached an enormous triangular chamber threaded by a narrow bridge.(...) The three walls of the chamber were lined with a grid of wide stones, and each stone bore a strange relief, a warped visage with an elliptical mouth that stretched from chin to brow.(...) The empty divots of their
eyes stared silently, so many beyond counting, stretching further than my eyes could see. "Here, the Hall of Hollow Maws.(...) We need one, any one." The walls were too far from the bridge to reach, and so I drew in air, assuming physical form once more, then stretched my hand towards the strange face stones and strained, feeling the power well up from my blood. Yet though the air between my hand and one of the stones was distorted, it did
not come to me. Instead, I found myself pulled towards the stone, my feet sliding along the thin bridge until I dropped my hand. I tried pulling a separate stone on the other side of the bridge, but found myself sliding toward it, toward the edge just the same. "Why must you always require such difficult things?"(...) Before the liche could answer, the tramp of armored feet came stomping from behind.(...) I turned to see a hulking figure clad from head to feet in heavy plate, wielding a large
maul in one hand. The visor of his helmet was open, revealing a skeletal face beneath. "That is a problem."(...) "Oh please, I just took 50 of them." "Those were merely reanimated. That is a revenant." "I had seen one before at the fall of Fort Zaestra, when I was a mortal man. It had crushed anything and anyone that stood in its path, and I was left with no choice but to flee." "I'm not running this time." "You damn well should be."
"What can he do to me now? I bet he's too slow to even touch me." "Not the point, Alaric. Not what we're here for." The revenant came marching straight for me, not changing its pace, saying nothing.(...) It swung its maul with tremendous force at my head, but I darted aside and struck back with my sword, which pinged off the plate armor uselessly. It whirled and swung again, an unavoidable blow for a human, but not for
me. This time I ducked and thrust upward, stabbing through the visor, breaking open a much larger hole where one of its eyeless hollows had been. "Don't strike him!" I barely registered the liche's voice through the heat of the blood trance.(...) Using the pommel of my blade, I hammered into the revenant's armor with all my might, sending him staggering backward.
Undaunted, he came again, striking nothing but empty air as I passed behind him and hammered down again.(...) Then again and again, a flurry of crushing blows rang out in the tunnel as if from a hundred blacksmiths, and the revenant was brought to his knees.(...) He made no sound as he knelt, but stared up at me in silent enmity through eyeless hollows of mismatched size.(...) I thrust my hand forward, emitting a telekinetic blast that sent him sprawling onto his back
with a crash of metal on stone. His hammer was flung from the bridge in the blast and clattered in the darkness below.(...) I wasted no time, rushing upon him in a fraction of a second, and smashing his armored head until his crumpled helmet rattled with skull fragments. The revenant stirred no more, and I stood above his battered form.(...) "I spit at thee," I said to my fallen foe; though my dead mouth made the effort it had no spit to give. "You had better move fast."
"You worry too much, Amarax. They can't even—" A heavy gauntlet seized my ankle, and my head darted down to see the revenant growing faintly with purple fires that gave no heat.(...) Before I could react, my feet were yanked from beneath me. But no sooner had I struck the ground than the revenant lifted me up and over his head, only to slam me down again and again, as if he were beating the dust from a rug. Then he seized me by the wrist and began
to pull in either direction. With all my might I was powerless to resist the revenant's grip.(...) It felt more like struggling against a fortress wall than a thing of flesh and bone. "Amarax, help me!" "Mist form!" I began to sigh, and the mist began to flow. But I was not able to completely dissolve before my right arm was torn from its socket and used to bludgeon my head repeatedly. Thankfully, my physical form gave way soon after, and I slipped from the
revenant's iron grip. I flowed back and away from him, exhaling and returning to physical form, restoring my missing arm, and yet the one the revenant had torn from me still hung from his hand, which he promptly tossed off the side as a bridge. He stomped toward me with no greater urgency than before, holding an armored fist out to his side, and with a low hum, his war maul flew to his grip. His crumpled helmet held no skeletal face now; only faint purple fires shone from
inside. I blasted him again with telekinesis, but this time he was not thrown backwards, only staggered briefly, his purple fires flaring brighter. "Stop attacking him for the Weaver's sake!" "Then how do I destroy him?" "You don't! Get away from him!" I turned and sped down the narrow bridge, loathe to flee in death as I had in life, but I was only making him stronger.(...) In mere moments, I was so far down the bridge that I could no longer see the revenant.
"Now take a hollow maw, and I'll pull you out of here." "I can't make them come to me! They resist my magic!" "Try the ones below.(...) Use your hands, but whatever you do,(...) don't touch their mouths." I leapt from the bridge, landing soundlessly on the stones below, careful to avoid the elongated slits of their mouths. Soon after I had landed, I felt my blood pooling in my legs as if it was pulled
downward. I was able to resist this influence, but I felt myself slowed, as if I were tied with weights.(...) The only other place to gain any grip were the three divots of the eyes.(...) I clutched them as best I could with both hands and pulled.(...) The blood flowed into my arms, granting me strength, and the stone began to slide free with excruciating difficulty.(...) Soon armored footfalls resounded in the distance.
"Hurry!" "I'm going as fast as I can!"(...) With my blood raging into my arms, I wrenched the hollow maw from the floor.(...) Once freed, I could grip the edges of the stone, but it was still tremendously heavy for its size.(...) On the opposite side, the twisted visage was mirrored, so I had to be careful where I placed my hands, lest they touch either mouth. With all my effort, I could hold it aloft, but I could barely move.(...) The armored stomping drew closer.
"Any time now, Amarax!" Then, near the base of the wall to my left, green energy illuminated a network of patterns and symbols, and a triangular passage was opened,(...) revealing the Atanite hovering just on the other side. I waddled toward the opening as best I could, given the weight of the maw and the caution with which I stepped around the mouths below.
The armored stomping ceased for a moment, and the revenant crashed to the ground between myself and the opening.(...) It swung its war maul in a downward arc, and reflexively I shielded myself with the maw.(...) When the maul struck against my hasty shield, it began to distort, like light through heat. The revenant jerked it back violently, but could not loose it from the maw, and soon he too rippled with distortions.
He made no sound as the whole of his form rippled and dissolved, swirling into the maw, and then he was no more. "You'll have to get another one now." "What just happened?" "You'd better move fast." Though the blood haze was still upon
me. I took the liche's words to heart and dropped the maw, which fell upon the face of another, but was unaffected.(...) I stooped and began to wrench another free, noticing as I did that the one I dropped had begun to glow faintly with purple fires that gave no heat.
"Quickly!"(...) I pulled the maw free, and lurched toward the triangular opening as the one that glowed began to tremble violently on the floor.(...) With a stretching stride, I stepped one foot out of the temple and onto the deck of the Atanite, straddling the two for a moment, then pulled the other leg on board. The discarded maw thrashed more violently until it burst in a tremendous explosion of purple flame, and two figures emerged.
One I saw only briefly before it fled, a thing of billowing shadow and a great fanning hood.(...) Six slanted eyes peered at me from the living darkness for a moment, shining the way an animal's do in the dark. Then it hissed in accursed hatred and writhed beyond sight.(...) Then stood the revenant, as kindling to a violet pyre.
Amarax lifted a skeletal hand and closed the triangular passage as the revenant stomped forward.(...) Then the wall where the opening once was dented outward with a heavy blow from the other side. "I told you not to strike him." "Isn't that aevitanium?" "It doesn't matter when they're angry." Amarax drifted toward the helmstone, leashing himself to it as more dents
appeared in the side of the temple. The Atanite began to pull away as the temple wall broke open in a gout of purple flame, and the revenant leapt. It landed on the deck with an armored thud and began marching toward me with the same deliberate pace as it had when
it first found me. "Take us near the storm,"(...) Amarax demanded, releasing the helmstone.(...) "No, please!" "Would you rather face that?" He gestured toward the revenant, and I dropped the maw upon the deck and sped to the helmstone, wincing in anticipation as I placed my hand above it.(...) Jade lightning sprung from the stone, lashing to my fingers, and I was Alaric the Damned no longer.
An intruder stepped across my back, burning with the power no magic could claim, and Master Amarax drifted forward to face him. The liche pointed at the revenant and spoke a word that echoed in thought. "Fall!" The revenant faltered, his legs buckled, and he fell on hands and knees. I leaned away from the old temple, moving on my own power, much slower than I could when the master filled my wings. The revenant's fires dimmed to a seething
glow. His headless helmet rose to gaze without eyes upon Amarax, but his armored body began to quake with rage, and the fires rose once more.(...) The liche's hand trembled, clattering in its struggle until it snapped back, as if recoiling from terrible heat, and the revenant stood once more. Heavy footfalls fell upon my back as the intruder stepped forward. He swung his maw at Amarax, who burst into a swarm of flies, but I saw that many were destroyed by the violet fires of the enemy.
Amarax gathered himself near my head, away from the revenant, who marched silently toward Alaric the Damned. The master raised his hand, and a thrumming ray of blue leapt off the inner wall of the storm, striking his open palm.(...) His other hand thrust forward, and arcane currents shot across my back, passing over the revenant and gathering about Alaric in a pattern of many lines.
The revenant swung his hammer into the barrier, and arcane energy coursed through it, through his armor, blasting him backward and sending the hammer hurtling away. Blue light crackled through the revenant's armor in patterns of straight lines, as he slowly brought himself upright once more.
I thought then that the revenant might set his sights on the one who had barred his way, but his gaze remained fixed on Alaric.(...) He stepped forward once more, plunging his gauntlets into the arcane barrier,(...) trembling erratically as the energy poured through him. But his fires grew brighter, and his gauntlets pushed deeper, until he was wracked with convulsions as the arcane
aspect of magic poured through him. Yet still the fires grew, until his armor began to glow as if molten, and he pushed through the barrier despite its power, until his grasp was nearly upon Alaric. Amarax stretched his hand toward the storm once more, calling a winding stream of black to him and through him and out his other hand, striking the revenant from behind.
The violet fires began to pour off his armor, siphoned down the black stream toward Amarax.(...) As they faded from the revenant, he was pushed out of the arcane barrier and dropped to his knees. (...) The fires engulfed Amarax, who motioned as if to redirect them from us as he had with the streams of magic, but his hands contorted in their efforts, and the echo of his scream resounded in all our minds. The barrier around Alaric dissipated, and the revenant held his
hand out to the side. With a low hum, his hammer came flying from afar, and he brought it down, not upon Alaric, but the helmstone, which shattered into many blackened shards and arcs of green. Alaric screamed as he was thrust back into his own mind, my own mind, for I was Alaric once more.(...) A gauntlet seized me by the throat and lifted me from the deck. But before I could even begin to shift into mist, the revenant cast me from the deck of the Atanite and into the Etheric Sea.
I watched as the arc drew away from me. This time I was falling. It must have been the presence of Amarax that held me aloft before.(...) I sighed, pouring mist from my mouth, enveloping my body, but even as a cloud of vapor I felt myself sinking down the widening funnel of the storm, towards the lower plane of roiling vapor.
My sight fixated upon the Atanite.(...) With all my will I strained toward it, but mist could not grant me flight.(...) My blood, even dispersed as mist, knew what fate evaded me should I fall.(...) I felt a stirring from within my vapors, a fluttering of wings. From the cloud of mist that composed me, a swarm of bats burst forth, calling and swirling in their flight.(...) I felt their many leathern wings beating, for
they were my wings. My being was spread across the swarm.(...) My experiences as mist and Amarax and the Atanite had prepared me for this disorienting sensation. In a way, I too was like water, or rather blood, taking the shape of what I was poured into, but I could only inhabit a single type of vessel at a time, as mist, as bats, as Alaric,(...) where a liche could split pieces of himself between many.
I rose above the Atanite, encircling it in my flight, and beheld the revenant, crossing the deck toward Amarax, whose body lay crumpled and glowing with violet fire. Through instinct and will and reflex I acted, gathering the swarm into itself, where each bat burst into mist, adding to a greater hole until it was a cloud, and I stepped out of it as Alaric once more. The revenant did not notice me, or did not care.(...) Either way, it was to be his final mistake.
Just as he raised his hammer above Amarax, I rushed alongside him and thrust out my hand, blasting him from the deck and out into the etheric sea.(...) He made no sound as he fell. His final act was to hurl his hammer in a whirling path at the keel of the ark. It tore through every deck, breaking up from beneath my feet, causing my blood to reflexively
push me to sidestep. The hammer clattered to the main deck, trembled slightly with a low hum, sliding toward the edge of the ark, then fell still.(...) I slumped down beside the liche with a sigh. Could I be so fortunate that this would destroy you? "Dreams cannot die... of course... break ritual... hide them... dream eater." His voice scattered through my thoughts, faint and distant.(...) He said nothing more for a long while, lying as if dead until the last of the purple fires had
faded from him. At length, the liche rose from the deck, inspected his hands, and a sigh of relief filled my thoughts. "You survived... Wonderful." "I was lost for a moment. If my primary vessel had been destroyed, (...) I might not have found my way back." "You're welcome, by the way." "Though you ultimately acted in self-interest, I do thank you, Alaric." "If you want to thank me, then free me." "I cannot. I have need of you yet."
The liche drifted to the discarded war maul that lay near the gash in the deck it had made. He gestured at the maul, and it rose from the deck to hover before him. "There are inscriptions on the haft, a Hymn of Shattered Dreams, and a Litany of Mirrors." "What does that mean?" "The Corpus Artificum inscribes the deeds of the worthy upon their arms and armor. Through the telling of the story, they are imbued with power.
These inscriptions were earned by slaughtering the Awakened by the hundreds, and for storming the gates of Ustiia on the day of the Black Sun. A pity came to this." "A pity? That thing almost destroyed us!" "Revenants are powerful weapons, and we need every arm we can muster against the Awakened." "Is it finally dead, then? Did I destroy it?" "The only thing that can destroy them is their own rage." "I destroyed one with the crucible once." "The necrotic aspect does not harm the dead."
"Well, it was a pair of legs when I was through with it." "You overloaded it. Violence only feeds their rage, and as it grows, so does their power. Eventually their rage becomes so powerful that it bends reality. Nothing can harm them like this, not might nor magic, but neither can they endure such rage for long without venting it, or it will consume them." "What aspect of magic is this rage?" "It is not magic. I cannot say what it is, other than that only Revenants can wield it."
"You seem to control it. You stole it from him." "A desperate gambit, and one that nearly destroyed me." "Suddenly my hands had begun to tremble, and a terrible malaise spread from my chest, like nothing I had ever felt in life or death. I could say it was like sickness, but that would barely touch it. All I knew is that my blood was telling me something was very wrong." "What's happening?" "You are suffering from blood withdrawal. It will worsen until you feed on human blood."
"The mention of blood stirred my own, and my skin began to crawl with need."(...) "Why? This never happened before?" "You never drank human blood before.(...) Not something vampires can typically manage without divine intervention." "I remembered the mural on the temple wall, so many scarlet streams, flowing to me as rivers of ecstasy.(...) Between the memory and the malaise, I could think of
nothing else but need. I struggled to my feet,(...) staggering towards a liche and grasping him by his robes. Please, you have to help me." An echoing sigh resounded from my thoughts. "I haven't any blood on board. You'll have to endure this for a while longer." "How much longer?" "We require two more components for our quest.(...) Then we may return to Malorum." "Well, let's go get them!" I clasped my hands together in an attempt to stop shaking. "Why, Alaric, you're so
eager to help... Suddenly..." "Oh, you know me... Always helpful." "Right..." "Well, leads away, captain liche." "Without the Hhelmstone, we have no way to steer the Atanite." "Well, we'll just put it back together then." I found myself on all fours at a stern in a flash, scooping up fragments of shattered stone into a pile. "We would need an artifex to repair it." "Let's go get one then!" A sigh resounded in my thoughts. "They're not likely to aid fugitives."
My hands began to tremble once more. "We may be able to manage without steering. Perhaps if I can target specific portions of the sails I could..." "Just... just tell me what I need to do." The liche reached to his headdress and removed the Soul Prism. "Take this below," he said, placing the prism into my trembling hand. "You will find a deck wherein lies the device of many concentric rings. This is an Armillary Conduit. Place the Soul Prism at its center and return to me."
And so I did as he asked. I went below, searching the decks until I found the one that was described. At its center a device of nine rings stood in silent alignment, the smallest of them far larger than myself. I rushed to it, held the prism out on open palm, and watched it lift from my hand to take its place in the center of the rings.(...) Then, one by one, they began to spin, each along its own axis.
The familiar thrum began to emanate from the prism, rising in pitch as green light brightened and the rings spun faster. Crackling green energy began to course through the rings, and then through a network of lines that spread from the base of the Armillary Conduit.(...) My blood, too, began to pulse in time with the rotation of the rings, and so I took my leave of the occult device.
As I ascended the stairs,(...) green energy rushed through them, as well through the walls and deck above, so that the whole of the Atanite was scrawled in luminous symbols. Back on the main deck I saw the symbols overspill with light until the Atanite was baptized in necrotic energy. Even my own body and the liche's were set aglow, and the arc itself began to hum. What is happening? Like flows the like.
The sight of the storm and the temper began to flicker and dissolve, and all was green until all was black, and then I saw them for the first time since I had fallen into the etheric sea, stars shone overhead.(...) I gazed at them in wonder for a time before I realized that I did not know them. Where is the sign of the Stranger? Where is the Laterum? Vesania? They may not pass here, as they yet live. I don't understand. For only stars that have died may shine in the Realm of the Dead.
- Alaric the Damned