• Closed • Chrien's Night

[Max]

10 Saun 722
Late Evening


With a sigh Maxine dropped to her knees in the sand of the beach of Foster's Landing. She dug her hands through the gritty ground, feeling it ride between her fingers like rough paper. The rhythmic rising and falling of waves several feet away whispered to her like a familiar lullaby. She took a deep breath and exhaled with the crash of the surf. Stress built in her body began to ebb. Her shoulders fell and the tightness in her jaw loosened.

Her progress was slow but it was there. She could see it in the body language of the subjects she stalked, in the tightness of the security around their homes and businesses, and the desperation in their decision-making. Gradually, like drops of poison in a drunken glass, she was affecting the Dorricks. Even if they didn't know it yet. Maxine wasn't one for the patience or intellect of chess, but she was moving her pieces around on the board while Benjamin and Tristane had no idea they were playing the game.

This work was tempering and humbling her just as gradually. To succeed she could not be impulsive and devastatingly destructive. This was a slow, intent death. She wanted them to feel their luck run out. She wanted them to feel the spite wrap around ever facet of their lives, growing and squeezing, until it stole far more than just their wealth and station. For what they'd done to Sabrina and those girls, they deserved it. For what Tristane had in store for Etzos, it was a necessity.

The Rusalka had traveled to Fosters Landing for one reason, and it had nothing to do with The Dorrick family. She was terrible at remembering anniversaries, birthdays, and holidays unless there was some sort of horrific trauma associated with them. Even then, especially when in the throes of a bender, she was able to let seasons slip past her nearly unnoticed. Except when it came to Chrien.

To trial would've been Chrien's Night in Scalvoris. The island, whatever remained of it, would not welcome her for the festivities. It wasn't like she stuck around after Faldrass to truly understand what happened two arcs ago, who lived or died and how much had been destroyed. She did know that the island of sailors would never risk the ire of the Stormbearer. The seas and its storms were too powerful, and luck in life too treasured to be without. Yet Max did not honor the trial out of fear. It was adoration.

"It's just like how we started, isn't it now?" Maxine spoke, words muted by the waves by anyone up on the docks who might hear the words intended only for her surviving matron. "Back to just you and I. Just as lost and red-handed as the trial you found me adrift at sea with that sword in my hand." She shook the sand from her hands and peered out toward the horizon. "Only one other stands between us now, doesn't she?"

Maxine retrieved the makeshift offering from her pocket: a little sailboat she'd found in her travels, discarded. She wandered to the edge of the sea and set it in the water. The ocean seemed to accept it and pull it back toward the greater mass that separated her from Scalvoris now. As the little ship braved the water, she watched it intently.

"I have no prayer to offer you this trial," she continued, expression resembling less emotion as she spoke a truth the Immortal had already voiced. "My life and my service is my offering. I've already yielded myself to you, haven't I?" The sailboat survived a small wave and powered over the white foam onward in its travels east. "You were right. I'm hardly a person anymore. Just a force of nature."

But not just that.

"Yours."

[Pig Boy]

The waves and surf of the beach came in variations of intensity. Some waves lapped limply far from where she knelt, while others coming right after, or a few cycles after the last would come and wash her feet out from under her, a sensation of sinking into the sand as it moistened beneath her. The storm came suddenly, without forewarning. It didn't take a great amount of imagination for Maxine to realize that her patron had arrived, or was soon to.

The storm cracked without lightning, instead a darkness fell beneath the suns of Saun. The skies were obscured by the precipitation and storm clouds. A rackish and rhythmic sound arrived from the midst of those clouds, a maelstrom in the center of them. It sounded like a laugh at one moment, a scream of unbridled rage the next, and a death rattle of a drugged out junkie at the last.

"Yours." Chrien's voice came clear of the din, heard and understood by Maxine alone. "You mock me, mortal."

Her face took shape among those clouds. Resembling a terrible gorgon or some other twisted sea creature, a matron of monsters.

"You think to cajole and flatter the Storm? YOU MOCK ME!" She screamed, and her voice could be heard in the deadly thunder cracks that shredded the air without even the slightest sign of lightning. "You think you know the pain of loss, motherless wretch!" Here her voice became a sob. "While the wretched spirits and their mortal accomplices danced upon the grave of MY MOTHER."

Chrien understood all too well how Maxine felt about Audrae, but she didn't care. Spite often enough wounded itself as others, and so it was with Chrien, as she sought to abuse her adored, instrument of destruction now. Abuse, as much as instruct. "You will know pain, you will know what it is to be spurned, hated and reviled by those to whom you are owed all apologies."

"Do you know what became of the last to try and cajole your one remaining Matron?" Chrien's grimace turned into an ugly smile, as clouds in the shape of sea serpents crawled across her face, obscuring the dull glow of her eyes, "Kura Wolfsdottir, she scolded me. Told me that I was being childish, that I ought to CALM DOWN!" An unbearable clamour of uproarious thunder represented her laughter, at the very absurdity of it. "I struck her down for that slight, that insult."

Chrien of course didn't inform Maxine of the ultimate fate of Kura. Let her think what she will. Chrien only needed to feel Maxine's fury, the depth of her despair and spite. Could she spit in the eye of her one lifeline in the world, the only one who yet adored her, albeit as much as Chrien was capable? "What do you say now, Wretch? Shall you urge me to be calm, to smile and swim meekly toward my unending grief?"

[Max]

The rhythmic, nearly predictable ebb and flow of the waves upon the beach changed in an instance. Influenced by the sudden arrival of a terrible tempest, the ocean became a churning mass of agitated ocean water to herald the dark, precipitous clouds that blackened the sky and swallowed the light.

There you are.

Chrien's arrival was almost always jarring and harsh, but this time the conditions were especially so. Something was different. Something had changed. She knew that with certainty when the abrupt laughter from the maelstrom devolved into a darkly familiar, derisive groaning. Maxine's jaw tightened.

The Bringer of Storms was on a particularly passionate tirade. Her voice was screeching and words sharp, and both the focus of her ire and the torrent of rain was squarely fixed on Maxine. Thunder cracked in her ear, splitting sound waves along with each pointed accusation and insult.

Motherless wretch?

Max scoffed. Never knowing what it was to have a present parent, let alone their identity, she'd been subject to plenty of digs referencing her status as an orphan since childhood. Perhaps some of her problems were rooted in her complete lack of understanding over what she was and where she came from, but she never longed to search for her absentee origins. They didn't care so she decided to return the sentiment of apathy.

As superficial as it was, Maxine knew Chrien had meant for it to sting. All she won was an indignant smirk that only faded when the Immortal lamented on her mother's murder.

Maxine would never know the bonds of blood. Audrae was not her mother. The few ties she made mattered immensely to her though, regardless of how imperfect, complex, or fluid they were.

The slain Shadow Mother had been one of the closest things to a maternal figure she ever had. Max would grieve her loss with violence and ruthless, unforgiving vendetta. She expected Chrien to understand that most of all. Instead she was met with a misplaced flood of ridicule that simmered her blood. Her empathy and patience wore out as the Immortal moved on to more threats and ill-wishes.

Pain? Spurned? Hated and reviled?

The Rusalka folded her arms laden with chain tattoos and the laugh that escaped was hard and devoid of amusement. Had the Immortal, in her self-righteous, maybe even jealous tirade, forgotten Famula's vice-like grip on her own blessed? Had she forgotten the injustices that Maxine had been cursed to rue every miserable waking trial of her life? Chrien was an unstoppable force and Maxine had been rendered a slave to every stupid bastard in earshot.

She was already distrusted, loathed, and desired only to be convicted to a cage or strung up for her irredeemable sins. Her new status and all that came with it had rendered her to a life of contempt with very muted, vapid emotional experiences. The majority on the list of those whose resentment might still wound her were dead. What was societal rejection when the only thing the despondent instrument of spite had left was setting fire to the mortal world?

Maxine glared at the cloudy face of the virulent being above. The Rusalka's chin was raised, her muscles were tight with restraint, and her legs were strong against the powerful, lapping tide grounding her where the beach met the sea. The empty space within her began to stir. The vitriol had washed over her in waves and each added more to the ever-starved vat of impulsive anger resting always just beneath the surface. The defiance within quickly began to mirror the flare of Chrien's great malice, and all the energy received was eager to be returned straight back to the sender.

Then Chrien smiled a wicked, cruel gleam. Suspicion entered Maxine's eyes the moment she caught it. Her eyes narrowed. The relentless storm billowed Maxine's saturated hair and another wave bit her ankles. Chrien spoke a name Maxine had refused to say aloud in two arcs, out of cowardice.

Kura Wolfsdotter?

Color drained from her face and her hardened expression fell, eyes even softening out of their fixed glower. Her arms unfolded and fell limp at her sides. A cacophony of thunderous, cold laughter deafened her ears. Maxine listened and her mind swam, head turning to the side while her distant eyes searched as though the answers to her bewilderment would be found in her field of vision. Her feet freed themselves from the heavy, wet sand and began backing her further up the beach away from the water.

"No." Maxine's hands balled into tight fists at her sides. An alien tightness entered her chest. "That's not possible. I know what I saw. Faldrass. Two arcs ago."

She had an inkling Chrien could not have forgotten it. Maxine had bled spite and rage with such fervor it had been nearly all consuming. The screams of mortals had filled the skies, a horror for the reckless actor but a serenade for the Immortal of Spite who loathed them so.

Max spoke between grit teeth, "You cannot kill what's already dead!"

She covered her mouth and paced away, turning her back for a single moment. The tightness in her chest grew and she found it harder to swallow than a bit ago. Her mind willed for the recall of painful memories at the same time she resisted them.

She saw the manor collapse, entombing the entrance to the tunnels and crushing all beneath its weight. The landslide had come stampeding down the volcano not long after, sure to consume the property. The Abarech had died that trial. She was as sure as she could be without seeing a body. She believed that more than she believed this spun tale, as if one version of the woman's end was any better than the other.

But if it's not a lie?

Maxine had been as fearful of accepting the crushing blow of bearing responsibility for Kura's death as she was the possibility she was still alive. Choosing to believe she'd killed someone with that caliber of character meant finally accepting there was no dastardly criminal more villainous or wretched than she. It meant sinking beneath humanity, an irredeemable husk intentionally flirting with death, with no more regard for morality or convictions. She'd fallen to her knees in defeat against her inner demons and let them consume her.

"I won't be dyin' here, I promise you that."

What if Maxine's eyes and mind had lied to her? What if she'd been arrogant and wrong?

"You, of all people, should know better than to underestimate how hard I am to kill."

Maxine could hear Kura's voice as clear as the trial she spoke the words. Her shoulders fell with the weight of the intrusive possibility, however slim. Her knuckles turned white at her sides. What if she'd carried all of this weight and self hatred over something that never happened? Her next inhale shook her. If it was true, like Audrae, there were things left unfinished and unsaid.

Maxine recognized exactly what Chrien was doing. She did the same to Faith in her kitchen and Sephira in the Rynmere tavern: spitting venom of weaponized versions of truths to get the reaction she wanted or believed she deserved.

Kura Wolfsdotter was a daughter of Karem, and besides being a Mortalborn, was one of the most powerful and resilient people Maxine had ever known. That didn't mean she was a match for Chrien. She fully believed that only Kura would have the foolhardy, swaggering boldness to tell such an entity to "calm down", and the Rusalka fully believed the Sea Scourge was petty enough to murder over the offense.

As much as she tried to resist it, the story was likely and she had no reason to believe Chrien would lie. It was a lot to process in the span of just a bit. Her heart thundered in her chest.

"You struck her down?" The Rusalka echoed, voice small and despondent. The small toy boat rocked precariously on its violent voyage. "You?"

A storm clouded her mind and her next inhale of air into her lungs was ragged and uneven. She could feel the rain on her skin and the storm shrieking in her ears, but it somehow felt so far away. A flurry of micro-expressions flashed across her visage.

"What do you say now, Wretch? Shall you urge me to be calm, to smile and swim meekly toward my unending grief?"

"No," Maxine answered hollowly.

Another pause. That short response was all she could muster. Chrien's confession had settled into her like a knife between her ribs. Maxine had felt no deeper sense of merciless betrayal. Staring up at the face in the maelstrom, the Rusalka knew her matron understood exactly what she had done.

Chrien knew what Kura was worth to Maxine even if it was a one-sided loyalty, and for a petty offense, she'd reaped her anyways. A grimace of great sorrow and fury crossed her face. The depressive haze lifted and a vengeful rage unlike any she'd summoned before roared to life.

Maxine truly had nothing left. The last string tethering her was severed. She let herself be broken right then. She wanted to be nothing but the storm of spite, hate, and avenging ultraviolence she felt inside.

"I urge you to take your head and your fragile ego out of the fuckin' clouds, you fucking cunt!" Maxine shouted against the howling wind and the pelting rain and the booming bouts of thunder. Defiant tears spilled from her unwilling eyes and her body shook with welcomed wrath. She opened up her arms against the tempest invitingly.

"I offered you my life, didn't I?!" She ripped her cloak off her shoulders and threw it at the tumultuous sea.

"Go on then!" Max snarled venomous spite through her inconsolable grief. She curled her gloved hands into fists again, gesturing for her matron to step upon even ground with her. "Come down here and fucking take it!"

[Pig Boy]

Far from shore, the storm clouds seemed to gather for what seemed like thousands of miles to the east. Thunder shook the ground, the water, the atmosphere. All around Maxine, as her own doubts, loyalties, hopes, prejudices were challenged, twisted on their head, crushed and devastated by the one entity she ought still to have trust in. Chrien knew she was hurting herself beyond hurt by alienating Maxine now. There would be no turning back or rebirth or forgiveness. No return to center. She knew what she'd done to Kura and how it would've affected Maxine.

But then, Luck has a funny way, and the confluence of Immortal and mortal influences involved in Kura's brief demise had played into that. Whether Kura's luck was in any part due to Chrien's capricious whims, she'd not finished the deed. But then, she still didn't want to let Maxine know. They had business. And she was far from done tormenting her servant.

Yet, she obeyed when Maxine told her to get down from the clouds, to face her. She stopped short of destroying Maxine as she landed upon the ground. There Maxine would see the monstrous matron, her body covered by glowing fracture scars, the results of many attempts, many overreaches all just to get back what was taken so suddenly and unceremoniously from her.

"So." Chrien said, the storm nearly drowning out her words. "Here we are, two poorly orphans." Chrien scoffed, nearly choking on the self-pity that overcame her. The truth was, she did see much in Maxine that reminded her of herself. It made her hate her more, and love her more. Chrien's face was a rictus of love and loathing, as she stared at Maxine.

The lonely toy boat still floated behind Chrien, sloshing on the violent waves, but somehow staying dry and afloat amid all of the violence.

For a long few moments, Chrien only stood there, naked except for the glowing scars and the barnacles that covered her tortured ethereal flesh. Her eyes shone red, as blood poured from them.

The storm moved on them, until they stood in the very eye of it, and all the sound went out of the air as Chrien invoked her final insult toward Maxine. "Kill me."

As the words were spoken, what felt like a tree branch grew from the wrist of Maxine. Looking down in her hands, she would find a narrow blade made of barnacled coral. Its point, she could tell simply by looking at it, was deadly sharp. "Do it, strike your matron. Strike Chrien, end her misery."

Having invoked the curse of their enemy no less than three times, Chrien stared with hatred past Maxine, at the world beyond her, to the west. The storm surge lifted the waters, but even still Maxine could see that lucky little toy boat floating on the waters. It resumed its journey out to sea, even in the midst of so much conflux and disaster. "All that hate, pain, venom, corrosive anger. Give it to me."

Chrien spread her arms out to the sides, and waited for the blow to land. Maxine had no choice, did she?

!	Message from: Pig Boy
	To be clear, Chrien asked three times for Maxine to strike/kill her. The final request wasn't specific about how she should hurt Chrien. Due to the way that Famula's Despised curse works, the three clear commands are known to/and understood by Maxine. The fourth was too vague to serve as a proper command.

[Max]

The Sea Scourge did descend and present herself before her bereaved blessed. Maxine’s right foot stepped back behind her, and her fingers flexed open and then back into a tight fists. Chrien had visited her Rusalka a few times, but never in a form so authentic. Her wild eyes carefully watched the form of her bleeding-eyed matron, noticing the marks of self mutilated that came with most desperate tribulation. Any mortal should’ve trembled to behold the Immortal.

Max did not move from where she’d dug her heels into the sand. She listened to the Immortal’s lamentation. The Immortal was right. They were just the same in the ways that mattered, as similar as an all powerful immortal and mortal could be. Besides the strength she’d been gifted in return for her allegiance and natural impulses that served the monstrous being’s domains, it’s what drew Maxine so strongly to her side.

When all others had turned on her or abandoned her, Chrien had always remained. Reluctant conscription had evolved into unwavering devotion. Maybe love, for as toxic as their connection was and how selfish both beings innately were.

"Kill me.”

Through her ire Maxine winced as she felt the command of the curse seize her. An odd, uncomfortable sensation occurred at her left wrist, and the Rusalka glanced down to find the barnacled coral weapon grown from her very flesh. She could feel it’s formidable quality as her feet were driven slowly closer to the Immortal. The best she could do to resist Famula’s punishment was to slow the approach, step by involuntary step on the beach. Her body shook but not with fear.

"Do it, strike your matron. Strike Chrien, end her misery.”

Another wince and a growl ripped from Maxine’s moving frame. Her feet dragged forward on the whim of a higher power, and the arm wielding the deadly dagger flexed with desire.

"How dare you use her curse to command me,” the Rusalka lashed sharply.

Maxine crossed the space between them, expression contorting between a volatile blend of resentment, grief, reservation, and a desire for cathartic retribution.

I don’t want this.

Yes, you do.

She dug her heels in and her muscles tensed, weaponized wrist loading the strike at her hip despite how she ground her teeth trying to control the impulse that didn’t belong to her. Maxine stared into the weeping eyes of her matron, the last person she sullied herself to with affection and unconditional loyalty. The only thing she had left.

Then, nothing.

The Rusalka let out a long, steadying exhale as she felt the shackles of her curse lift. The barnacled coral blade stilled at her side against her hard, tensed frame. All three commands were ignored. The disintegrated dust of the chain link her matron had given her slipped through the fingers of her other hand. She glared intently into the eyes upon her, and her own became tempered with inhuman, numbed belligerence.

Maxine drove the barnacled coral dagger into Chrien’s rib cage with all her might, a shriek of mourning coming from her. No order. Her own volition.

"You think you’re the only one who has been wronged, betrayed? You think you’re the only one who is angry? Who wants to make the world suffer, even if you burn with it?” Max cruelly twisted the knife. "I will not liberate you of your pain. No one has freed me of mine. It was supposed to be us versus them. For this, what you’ve done to me, I want you to be made to suffer…as I suffer now.”

And if her dagger did find its purchase, she planned to follow it now with the swing of her active, gloves fist.

[Pig Boy]

Chrien

The calm that has seized the air they breathed as the hurricane raged all around Maxine and Chrien gave a start, and the winds began howling once more through the silence as Maxine's gifted chain link, plucked from her own cursed soul and handed back to her, in order to defy this very order, and make her own choice. Maxine could have gone several ways in this moment, allowing her self-pity to overcome her, ignoring the commands and ending her own life. She could have allowed the order to stand, and stab Chrien through no volition of her own. She could have disobeyed the order and walked away, simply, turning her back.

She did none of that, nothing Chrien had expected. The capricious fortune that led Maxine to that moment culminated in the stab of her weaponized wrist-blade, struck into the scarred, unprotected ribs of Chrien. Forcing open a glowing wound that spread in a latticework of new fracture scars for the Immortal.

The pain of the Immortal must have been beyond anything to rival the worst a mortal could endure. She felt all of it, the venom and confluence of disasters she'd visited upon the world, from the time she turned on the Shay of Pyk, to now, as she spurned one of her remaining devoted followers. Tempting her to spite her own Immortal.

And the eye of the storm collapsed upon itself, everything was chaos. Only the lonely toy offering remained untouched, hopping up and down on the waves, yet remaining afloat.

Maxine would feel not only Chrien's pain and anguish as she plunged that dagger, but the decisions that had led to Famula's curse being levied upon her. Whether justly or no, Chrien spat all of that and more back at Maxine. The death of Hunter, her own flailing wrath that was eating away at the Dorrick family. The Death of Quinnley. Maxine felt herself as the sum of her own expressed ultraviolence, spite, and rage. The poison flowed both ways through the coral dagger.

Then Maxine turned her stun glove on Chrien, and there was a shift in the storm. If a tempest could tear asunder the air in more than four directions, it did so now. She felt the air tearing a wound through the fractive veil of reality. The power of her stun glove disrupted ether. Domain ether, Divine ether, all forms of powers could be fucked the hell up by that one special item.

And now she felt the first of the chain links of Famula's curse begin to shred away at her arms, her shoulders. The flew apart, out of her soul, and wildly thrashing anything within distance. Chrien felt the chains hit her, and more superficial scars formed on her body. Maxine too, felt the ectoplasmic energies disrupted and thrash her own mortal shell.

Then, a power began to form in the core of Maxine, she felt Chrien's power flowing more and more into her. Until she realized, she could survive this. An armor protected her, ensconcing Maxine in a protective armor, that allayed all of the storm's force and fury, was even strengthened by it to an extent. Then Chrien looked up, smiled at Maxine, and she knew now the depth of Chrien's spite, that she would tell a warped truth in order to spurn her remaining exalted. Kura yet lived, though not through any mercy of Chrien. How this was possible, was anyone's guess. But Maxine knew it in herself.

Whether it mattered anymore, was her own to decide.

The chains then began to pull at Maxine, through all of the storm's forces pulling the curse apart. But Famula's magic was strong, and adhered in its strength to Maxine's soul. She'd feel it pulling her apart at the seams, nearly tearing her into four quarters, before she passed out.

Sometime later, she would awaken on that same shore, the storm having passed her by, toward the west, toward Etzos. The little toy boat she'd made an offering to Chrien had somehow survived all of that violence, and now washed ashore, at her feet.

Luck often enough will save one, if they only hang on.

Her hateful matron's words echoed in her mind, as she felt new power entering her. Chrien had left her with that, at least.

!

Message from: Pig Boy

Famula's curse has been disrupted, not removed from Maxine. The first two levels (hated and despised) don't function during daylight hours now, but only during twilight, when Famula's domains are strongest. They will affect her during the night, and she will understand this. A combination of Maxine's actions, and Chrien's own power have given Maxine a small taste of freedom from the curse. The Condemned curse, of course, is too strong to shake at the moment. Post once more to wrap-up, and I will review!

[Max]

Maxine had known pain but not like this.

Her own storm of scorn and turmoil was amplified by the physical pain and anguish she wrought upon the Immortal through her own act of insolent spite. Chrien had not taken the attack without one of her own. She tortured her Rusalka with knowledge, forcing her to see the pathway that brought her to the cursed place she was without the benefit of her own biased lens. She forced Maxine to re-experience her recent sins and revisit the unnecessary evils she alone was responsible for. Maxine could feel all the venom and corrosion that made up and drove Chrien, just as she could feel her own in herself.

No mortal was meant to weather this storm. The moment she called Chrien down from the clouds, and more so when she made her decision with the dagger, Maxine never expected to come out of it at all. She was not a mortalborn or an Immortal. She was no one, and by the time the inhuman agony was over, she expected to be nothing at all. Yet even then Maxine was too stubborn, too defiant to suffer helplessly, crying out against the forces that tore her mind and body asunder. She did the only thing she'd known how to do: swing.

The Rusalka felt Famula's hold began to shatter upon her. She felt the chain links break away and the vice grip loosen just so. Then she felt the change in her angry, corrupted core whose source was as familiar as her own blood. Max felt Chrien's power begin to fortify her and her certainty of death right here and now ebb with its arrival. Her eyes, tightly squeezed as she bore what had come to her, slowly began to open. When they landed on Chrien and found the Immortal's smile she felt her grief subside but her fury amplify.

How, she didn't know, but Kura had neither died at Faldrass or whenever it was she'd had the misfortune of confronting Chrien. Max was hardly surprised by the manipulation. Immortals seemed to only enjoy her as their play thing to cruelly torment for one agenda or another, and what had been done to her she'd done to others more times than she could count. The knowledge was no kindness and the Rusalka wasn't a fool to mistake it as such.

Max had lived with a knowledge that gave her permission to be every sort of villain after Chrien's own heart. There was no excuse for what she was any longer now that she knew this truth. Kura Wolfsdotter's resurrection in her mind suggested new obstacles. Beyond the discomfort of the unending disappointment, perhaps even unforgiving, violent rage, she believed was on the horizon...Maxine couldn't discount a real possibility of being hunted by the Albarech. She wasn't so arrogant to believe she stood a chance as a fugitive from a Daughter of Karem for long, and facing Kura from the other side of any field would bring her no joy. Maxine would not go back to prison.

The chains of Famula's curse tugged more deliberately now. Though some links had broken away and teased her with release, the vice grip was being fought from around her very soul now. Despite herself she dropped to her knees before the Immortal and braced herself against the sandy earth. Still the chains tugged, and damaged her in a way she did not know how to fight it. For a brief moment while she was suspended in this gruesome state of anguish she wondered if this was what Rey'na had felt, when she held her down as the Mantis tore out her spark. Then the pain blacked her thoughts out before putting her out altogether.

When Maxine did awake she had no idea how long she'd been unconscious on that beach, sand caked to her face, arms, legs, and clothes. Her eyes opened first and a great aching soreness was the next thing that hit her. For a while she could only lay there, listening to the ocean, hearing Chrien's hateful yet encouraging words, and staring at her offering resting at her feet. She felt different. She couldn't explain the forces that brought the change, but she knew what acquired power felt like. She attributed it to her matron, for all terrorizing she'd brought upon her own.

Max had survived the encounter with a little more strength to boast, but she felt weak. The revelations had been much to bear. Her emotions, in their largest and most raw form, had been absolutely exhausting. Her very being, after nearly being torn apart, had little left to will her to her feet. She watched a crab scuttle along the beach and pass her with its black, beady eyes atop its shell before it moved on.

Then her eyes fell closed again.

[Pig Boy]

RPG Rewards:
XP: 15
Knowledge:

• Endurance: x2
• Deception: x2
• Resistance: x4
• Torture: x2
• Combat: Unarmed: x2
• Combat: Blades: x2

Other Rewards: Chrien Exalted, first three poewrs.
Zuuda Curse weakened during daytime. WIll update your wiki on both counts next time I'm on there.
The coral blade that Maxine wielded is gone by the time she awakens.

Link to Review Request on the Forum: N/A

Skill Review: All Skills used appropriately to PC's level

Notes: This was a fairly intense experience. I've rarely moderated a mark story as violent and intense as this. Certainly this has to be the most painful and violent one for the pc and Immortal involved that I've witnessed. Your writing throughout really drove me to come back here and I enjoyed every post between us.

I'm glad I had the fun of moderating it. Hopefully it was fun to be on the player side of things LOL. Although I'm fairly sure Maxine had the exact opposite of fun.

Enjoy the newfound power and angst!

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns regarding this review, feel free to PM. Enjoy your rewards!