Private Baptism By Fire

[Illia]

​

It was a curious thing, the line rushing towards space.

Lancing through the magenta sky to breathe cyan into withering clouds, the single line parted the setting sun like Moses to the sea; a single, horizontal streak, a shooting star falling upwards, lightning climbing back into the Heavens. In a single breath it had appeared, and in the next, but a figment of the masses imagination as it was dutifully ignored by the commonfolk as something easier to believe. The misfiring of an apprentice stave, the showing off of some knight who had the loosest grasp upon the Weave… but there was something a little different about the silent, then disappeared manifestation of light that most did not give a second looking to; steam.

Smoke.

Fireless, the tree-tops afar danced with thin coils of inky smoke floating up on high to where the very clouds themselves had sizzled and popped and it was not their tails that whirled about them in that moment, but the rapidly dilapidating manifestation of steam where the clouds themselves had been burnt through. An ominous ‘O’ where sunlight fell through its center. The bleeding of an orange horizon into a deep, ominous red, and the peering of the moon timidly over far mountains. Night was coming. Shadows grew long, and in the darkness the memory of the strange line waned in favor of the first glimpsing of sparkling stars upon the universe's great net.

With the turning of the sky the monsters would dance, hidden away in the forest's murky heart, and a baptism in fire would begin.

 

[Walter Thornley]

"The roads converge there," Conrad pointed. "We should catch up to them before they veer off the tract-"
For an instant, all eyes were on the sky in the direction where the flash had just rushed through. Their question had just answered itself.

"Con, Josie, return to the estate," the baron spoke under his breath. Eyes lingered on the burnt through clouds long after the light beam was gone. That was an inordinate amount of Shroud. It was gone now, but the damage had already been done. He had to go.

"My- waitwhat?" Josephine's voice stuttered and broke, she shifted in the saddle.
"My lord?" Conrad echoed her, turning from blinking the rainbow dots out of his field of vision to face him.
"You heard me." His voice didn't raise. "Recall. I will deal with this on my own."
"Are you planning to dispose of the entire cult by yourself, or just the travelling convoy clearly guiding something that can rip a hole in the clouds and start a fire, my lord?" Josephine's eyes narrowed. She chewed on the inside of her cheek.

He didn't answer immediately. Conrad, as the eldest of the entire travelling party, was about to try saying something else, but stopped short as the baron corrected himself.
"You aren't wrong. Conrad, lend me your long bow. Josephine, you will guide Geist once I dismount."
"Looks like a forest fire starting. Nothing can stay in there, my lord, unless you're flameproof..."
"The burst was magic, there will be no fire - the Shroud is already gone. Light me a midnight lantern. If you see my flame, then I cannot retreat on my own, come get me if you can. Until then, I don't want either of you near it."
"But... forgive me, but why?" Josephine insisted. To her, it seemed like a likely suicide march.
"Because whatever it was - I am much harder to target than both of you."

*

At duskfall, he stalked through the veil of the smoke. The heavy cloak lay around the shoulders, its edge dragged against the forest flooring of thick grass, dry sticks and stray curving roots. The cultists, at least some of them weavers, were still a threat in the vicinity - but less of a concern than whatever caused the mess.
Slowly but surely, the Hunt's master drew closer to where the incident must have occurred. The drakehorses and the riders were gone, to keep a respectful distance. He was truly alone, now. Leather glove creaked, tightening around the grip of the silver-edged sword. But something told him, it would not be the sword drawn, but the blade at the small of his back, a dagger curved like a claw and blackened like the bones of his right hand.

He had little to hide from whoever was here, he ruled. None were getting out alive, if they were the Sightless the Hunt has been tracking across half the kingdom.

And so, his senses unfurled, and the world sharpened to an almost painful degree. He could smell the scents of wet dirt, fading smoke of burnt wood, the dampness of the yester-rain.
Closer.
Every breath of the breeze brought the movement of grass, steady shuffle, light tapping of branches one over another the skittering of fleeing forest life. The forest life gave him a wide berth, as always, by instinct.
Closer.
His irises brimmed with haloed lights, will'o'wisps two distant lights at the pits of the pupils - and he could see into the shroud of the night. Searching, patiently, like a cautious predator, for an ambush, a larger form of any sort. Any meaningful indication of life.

 

[Illia]

His eyes spied a brilliance somewhere afar.

It were as if sparklings of snow peaked precariously through the winding ruffage, the diamond-shine of something unusual. Something static yet living that caught the light like stained glass but a hundred and fifty feet away that came with every blink and vanished with the next; but it would not be the first thing the Baron would spot on his careful advance through the twilight forest.

Through the petrichor came the unmistakable smell of burnt flesh.

The sound of tight rope creaking against an old tree, and just ahead, the shadow of a man pinned by coils to a trunk. He was entirely nude, rubbed raw by the biddings at his wrists and thighs and stomach, but no hint of shame danced upon his face-- what was left of his face-- as the approaching footsteps quickened his breath and made him wiggle in excitement. Such vigor for someone whos eyes where blackened husks, whos blood had been seared into his skin, whose frail strands of hair had been melted into his brow, for the top half of his face was a dark and weeping mess of puss and plasma from skin cracking over and over again in its soreness. It was not old. The stench was nauseating.

“I-Ingol, is that you?” Came the scratchy voice, head twisting too and fro to try and pin-point where the person approaching was. Without his sight and with their camp laying so far from civilization, it had to be another member of their company, right…? And no doubt it was his wife, come to visit the poor man in his time of need…! With saliva frothing at his lips from the pain of the still-swelling, ever bursting mass of burn-sores upon his skull, he began to babble incoherently,

“Ingol, tell the seers I did not mean to touch her, I was overcome by excitement in the moment and could not stop my hands, it was as if the light itself was calling me to do so-- I am a fool! I know I am! If they could cut me down I wish to go too, how could you go without me? What will I do in Bliss without you? Ingol?”

The testing of his bindings did nothing but continue to rub the frayed bulk of the rope against already raw skin, which began to prickle and only redden further with every strainted tugging. Sweat began to roll down the shapes of his naked body as there came a pause in movement in response to a single cheer that was rising above the trees like the howling of a dozen wolves calling to an uncaring moon-- the struggle continued after, even more furiously so.

“I can’t be left behind!! I can’t, please, Ingol, i-if its you or anyone else, release me, I have to go, I have to go!!”

The lurching of his tone conveyed that if he could cry, he would have.

 

[Walter Thornley]

The stench hit worse than any blow, because when it reached his mind, he could not hear the voice calling for Ingol. The baron drifted closer to the cart, to the flesh-melted man who was delighting in his torment, or perhaps simply in shock of what happened, the clarity before the fall. He did not string the bow. He did not unsheathe the sword. His tension was a slow stalking of a mountain lion across its domain in search for a threat, not a fox scampering from something that might have been larger.

Eyes filled with starlight witnessed the shimmer, registered the direction and the distance. Fear, shock, memories too vivid to keep his mind straight, could come later, could come later. Right now, emotion receded like the tide, and left the reason bare as bone. The foundation of his survival, detaching from what was Walter Thornley, and treading the middle ground to where Harvest tempered him.

His shadow passed by the cart, stopped, cloak too dark to be wool, the curved karambit blade glinting cold over the molten flesh.
"Where did she go?" he demanded, not loudly but clearly, voice ringing with command that tolerated no questioning. "Who is she?"

 

[Illia]

“... Outsider.”

Spoken after a pregnant pause fringed only by distant voices muffled by the forests depth. It was a complete break from the manic way he had rambled before, but surprisingly there was very little malice in the blind mans tone; usually these sort of affairs forbid others getting close, and quite commonly the closed-off communes were weary if not downright hostile to anyone who had not yet fallen into the fold… but this was different. He stilled upon the bark, no longer tested the creaking ropes, and hung there dejectedly with a quietness that indicated thought.

Something also common amongst cults was their willingness to talk, if it dragged more people to them.

“... Will you let me go? I need to join the others.” Softly, solemnly. “After twenty seven years since the sun’s sky-fall, we thought we would never again receive a sign that Bliss was ready to take us back to our unknown state, the beginning spark, but then we saw her. I-If I die here, I can never be unmade. I need to get back.”

All nonsense, the wayward burning of a meteorite blazing in the atmosphere, a collective mingling of people who gazed upon it and thought, in that moment, they and they alone were destined to burn as brightly. To ascend the make-believe golden steps of some fiery nothingness where they would find a paradise untouched; delusion. Shared beliefs reinforced by nothingness. Countless years watching an unforgiving sky. The burnt, cracked lips of the man turned upwards in a haggard, grim smile that sent watery blood run between his blackened teeth.

The darkness of the affair had not made itself known. Not yet. A cult member would never speak ill of their cult, naturally.

“The sky has sent us a pale mare, and s-she burns with the brightness of the sun itself. Tonight, we will once again witness the flash that did this to me; but we will not remain here, upon the earth. We will burn brightly, and unto Bliss step forward to forever walk in light. We will be unmade. Bliss only accepts the basest of our forms, stripped free of all sin. Only those who are cleaned in holy fire can see the path to paradise…”

Quieter and quieter still, solemn but entirely honest; this man planned to be burned to death… and with him, countless others in a ritual suicide. The only fear that marred him was the fear that he would not be there when it happened. The marred head turned vaguely in Walter’s direction, the holes where his eyes once sat like lumps of coal embedded in weeping skin,

“Please, you have to let me go… I-I have to be there, with Ingol…”

Beyond them both, the camp had settled into an eerie, damning silence.

 

[Walter Thornley]

'Outsider.'
A low hum. The poor wretch didn't know how right it was - moreso, right now, when he could feel the Harvest's waking keen. Unfocused, as of yet, and yet his every instinct called pursuit before his nature took the reigns from him completely. People didn't like it when he was on the trail. A dark thing spit out to reestablish the equilibrium where it was about to be lost. To consume the other dark things, never full.

Melted and charred slurred litany erupted from the cultist, half in hope half in a plea for help. The dark eyes watched. He listened, patiently, for any grain of sense. One word stuck in the mind. Unmake.
He thought cold, wintery thoughts, then murmured,
"I could unmake you. And if you do not serve - I will do so right now."
Distant starlight haloed at his irises, gathered in will'o'wisps at the pits of the pupils. The weave revealed itself, floating embers and mirrored capillaries, the heartbeat of aspect-rooted existence and unmanifested fonts of power in the ley lines.

Ten heartbeats. Consideration.
The loathing-sharp knife sliced at the ropes. One, the other, once more. Done.
The man would not run away far, not with how he was.
"You will go to this place, and I will follow."
He did not mention the flash. All of the people that the wretch expected to come get him were probably dead already.
Still, for the sake of making certain that no weave from those deaths formed into a summoning, he had to go.
For the sake of touching to the corpses with his blade or blackened head, drawing at the essense of their blood or rot, and snapping the Shroud within - so that unresting spirits would not find anchor and stir the dead flesh... for that, he had to go.

He pulled off the right glove, slowly, a shudder passing through him as the material dragged against skin, and then the colder air. Didn't look at the bared digits, merely passed the knife to fold them around the grip. He was, by his maiming, ambidextrous, and yet the blade still felt right in his hand, not the left. And there was none who could see, or would remain to know. Still, the appendage dove under the cloak folds.
"Lead." The voice resonated in an odd cadence, split and knit back together again from multiple, barely divergent from Walter's own. A command, the price of disobeyance - a quick, final death.

 

[Illia]

The threat falling from Walters lips only stoked a passion within him; it was not the danger to himself that spurred him, but the desire to be with his beloved wife afar by the fires of the unknown. A breathless gasp, a stumble and trip to his hands, and then a voice welling with emotion--

“Thank you… thank you! Ingol…!”

The strange man and his unseen dagger could have plunged the blade that had scarcely nicked his tired skin directly into his chest, but he did not. Whether this was the manifestation of some higher powers will or merely luck, the burned fellow would not stake such high risks on an attempt to flee-- or, even more foolish, attack with no weapon or sight-- and so did as he commanded with slow, unsteady steps… he led. There was no light to guide him, but they both were subjected to the muddled chattering of voices dancing together in the distance, and that sound was the anchor of those frayed senses. The roots and trees bumped him. The leaves rattled when his burnt-out wick of a skull scraped them.

“Y-you were very lucky to find me, maybe Bliss’s light called to you too?” He breathed, hands out in front of him to feel for oncoming foliage, “You can be unmade here, i-if you like. I’m sure, if you made yourself bare and declared your sins, you’d be accepted just as we will be…!”

But in the moment, his words mattered little.

The meeting-grounds were a sight indeed.

Twenty six people, a mass of bare, nude bodies strewn about the ground in laying or sitting positions, legs and arms touching, talking to their left and rights and all around a decaying fire that flickered with the smell of something foreign. There was no mixing of races, they were entirely dirtied men and women upon hand woven blankets with faces that screamed of a secret kind of ecstasy that only they knew of, that only they had glimpsed upon a burning sky. But though upon first glance it seemed relatively a simple affair, a lunatic cult-ring of naked wayfarers, there were two things entirely bizarre with the scene; one to the left, and one to the right.

To the blackened left directly beneath the moons gaze, where the shadows cast darkness upon them, were an assembly of people that did not share the same happiness that riddled the others faces. Four women with fabric against their eyes and rope between their teeth, tied like hogs and discarded there nude to shiver and writhe every now and then in the dirt and the dying grass. These were not human. Their lithe bodies and the pricking of their ears painted them as elves shorn of their dignity, their lips red raw from the rubbing of rope and their pretty hair tangled with burrs and twigs-- the vivid, blackened bruises upon their body spoke of struggles suppressed. Poor creatures left to the night, they made no noise, they awaited a horrid end.

To the bright white of the moonlight cascading over the right clearing was, indeed, a pale mare. No normal steed, the tall, thin beast was comprised of fur that glowed beneath the waxing light, started by the crescent of a long horn, ended by the furling of a tail that slowly but surely endlessly looped upon itself; her being, her blood itself was the Shroud. A Unicorn. It was strange; a beast of legend seen possibly once every fifty years by mortal eyes was simply standing there unafraid, seemingly quite contentedly amongst the thrum of noise. A dangerous magicks in the form of a dream, the creature had been boredly peering over at the humans and their hideous knickering noises before Walter and the man had appeared at the mouth of the camp… and from that moment onwards, the stunning equines violent cyan eyes were affixed squarely upon the dark-coated man with a razor-sharp stare.

This was not part of the plan.

“Ingol!” The man cried as a thin, wiry woman jumped up from the entanglement of bodies to scurry over to her blind husbands side; straw hair, gaunt circles beneath her eyes, genuine tears of relief. The embracing, caterwauling pair had not eluded the rest of the camp either, who began to twist and turn their heads to one another in genuine confusion,

“Who are you?” Stated a large bearded man with a woman at either side, circled about his arms like comforting cats. “Why did you set Emil free? He was being punished for a crime; you had no right....”

A chorus of voices all rose up at once. Questioning, debating, exclaiming ‘Emil’ in relief, shushing each other fruitlessly.

 

[Walter Thornley]

Gratitude from the cracked and weeping mouth of a half-molten, half-charred man, meant naught. These were not his lands, these were not his people. He was not their lord. And an obscurata was not there for the people first and foremost. He was there to nip the calamity in the bud. Gods knew, so many happened before he got to the source. Some - just before his eyes, passing through the conduit to grow and spread the malice.

There were many times he pondered on why - why couldn't he bring himself to harm the other obscurata, the luckbender. The best reason Walter could come up with, was that death would not rectify the disbalance - only unanchor it, and the rest would have gone as it had. He had to make peace with that reasoning, not knowing otherwise, even though a part of him, like a ringing in his ear, insisted - that was not all there was to it.

He followed, the body Walter's but the mind almost devoid, razor-focused on every detail as he set foot into the camp. The squirming bodies, the bound bodies, registered, but what was cause for alarm - was the Weave being spun by the orgy, begging fire of creation and destruction to finish manifesting, in every form, and then...
When two opposites collided, a breach in the Shroud was created. The crudest, most volatile form of it, with no predictable effect.
He'd been at this for years. He'd seen more than his fair share of every kind of horror, whether the Shroud was destroyed, breached, or overaccumulated in one place, attracting things outside the norm.

These people could not invoke the radical impact - if they were dead first.

Eyes glimmering with distant long-dead lights turned to the mare. The human hand extended, pointing a finger.
"You are a catalyst for these people's wish. Begone from their circle - or fall to Harvest first, among the rest of them."
Last grace. He bore the duty to reap calamity, and no creature would be exception if it was fuel to chaos.
Not except the damned luckbender, and he still could not fathom why.

Shadows fell as sharp as the man's palor, as dark as the light in his eyes glimmered. The precipice, the wound up before the leap - to shift, transform into something Other entirely. And once he would, this would no longer be a place for any peace nor negotiations.
He was here, attuned to the critical mass gathering in the air. And he was not going to let the seed bloom.

 

[Illia]

The ignoring of their questions caused the circle to explode into a slight ruckus as they began chattering amongst themselves once again in hushed voices; the large, nude, bearded man abandoned his women to wander up to the stranger with a boldness that spoke of certainty… but when he opened his mouth to speak, it showed that he and his throng thought of the impending doom as something far different.

“Settle down… ‘harvest’? What are you talking about, you mad-man??” He was laughing, but there was a hint of cutting to his tone as he waved a hand in front of Walters face. The Unicorn did not say a single word, watching the scene unfold…

“We, those who are not gifted by the shroud, and our maidens, who led us to this very spot, are going to climb the stairs to Bliss! We simply need this mares light to ascend, hand in hand, into holy paradise…! That is our wish!”

The maidens, the four bound and blindfolded elves turned themselves subtly in the dark, alerted by their mentioning. They were the guides to whatever ‘fabled’ spot the cult wanted to hear, for the actual physical destination mattered not and they had simply lied until they could get as close to a settlement as they could… in a desperate bid for help. They were more than aware that they too would probably perish in this light. The moment they burned they were to become the door after all, swinging wide open for the magickless to peer onto the forbidden other side of the ever-encircling presence of the Shroud around them.

And Illia would be the one to send them all through… and in that process, the door would crumble, shatter, and fall. It would become a hole.

A hole of burning, holy light.

And it seemed… no-one there knew what this meant except for Walter.

“... Are you human?”

Like a cold, cutting bell, suddenly the voice of the Unicorn rang through the silence and hubbub as every prattling human died down within an instant. It was an emotionless voice, accompanied by the great beast raising her head to look upon Walter with eyes sparkling in the fire-light-- an unnatural cyan, the same colour that forked through her once broken horn. She knew something was wrong, but like most beasts born of the shroud, this did not mean she knew everything about it. The idea that this could be a disaster of any kind had not crossed her pretty mind, not even once. All this was to Illia was a chance to rid the world of terrible people. The rolling of suspicion in her chest did not lessen her tone however, as despite being incredibly off-put by Walter-- who felt akin to a dark, rolling storm that threatened to strike at the heart of the camp-- Lia kept her nerve. He was… different. ‘Other’. Her journeys had not yet taught her what that meant, for the last ‘other’ she had met had fast become her friend...

“No… not human. Not entirely.” She murmured, tilting her head to the side with a heavy pawing of a silver hoof upon the earth, “And I am not a mere beast, I am not a dog to be shouted at and threatened. If you know reason then you will speak it before jumping to madness.”

Narrowed eyes, the pride of the Unicorn was legendary, and it was not to be exempt.