Fantasy RPG Forum - Standing Trials

The quiet was something he could never get used to. Well, the lull, he supposed would be more accurate. A city of a million souls, even depleted by nine-tenths, was never "quiet". Even if a lot of the noise was ghosts.

That wasn't a metaphor, either. Two arcs on from the siege and the razing, the Season of Sorrow and the Time of Vengeance, Etzos was infested with them. Wilbur knew that was the wrong word to use, yet again. That implied pests, rodents, unwanted and disgusting visitors. The specters that wandered the rings and the circles were none of those things. They had fought and some had died a second time in defense of their home, sacrificed their eternities for a chance that the living might wring justice and revenge from their efforts. But it was still... an adjustment.

The young man grunted softly. Next to him, his partner on the gate shot him a queer look. Etzori, he thought to himself. Always so inscrutable.

Rakeem was older than his partner, but didn't feel it. The young soldier had the eyes of a twenty-year trooper set deep into the face of one barely into his third decade. He was one of that generation that was forever scarred by war and famine and plague and horror and fear and rage and all the tumult that had battered their homeland for what seemed like an age. First Lisirra, then Sintra. First plagues and monsters, then cultists and betrayal. Then the long, painful rooting out of loyalists and traitors and the leftover abominations of both. Whether they be diseases or beasts or other, more insidious things.

All that, tasked to a nation that had been slaughtered down to its bones. Like a strong man with his muscles hacked and rotted away until he could barely stand.

But we did, Wilbur thought with a grim smile. We survived. Killed one immortal and saw another off. Boom-boom, one after another. Wankers.

Rakeem frowned slightly at the look on the younger man's face, and decided not to ask. He had some time with the militia in Rharne, so this seemed like a good fit for him. His family had come the previous arc, one of a fresh wave of immigrants to a country sorely needing new blood. But their little idols to the Goddess of Plenty and Profit stayed in their backroom. They did not make offerings nor speak her name. At first it had been... bothersome. Unnerving. But the seasons waxed and he adjusted and... now it was home. A steady job, nice uniform, adequate pay, and the lodgings, well...

The sun-kissed man shuffled a little. They had their pick of houses in the Outer Perimeter. Most were empty. Few occupants would ever return.

"Hold!"

The young man spoke in an old man's bark and the wagon train stalled before the stern stone statue. Parhn, founder and father of Etzos, gazed down with his hands wrapped around his sword. As if judging every new arrival to the city. The portcullis was open under him, but Wilbur and Rakeem allowed none to pass without questioning. It held things up, and there was a line behind the wagons, but security wasn't something anyone in Etzos spoke of frivolously. Not anymore.

"Afternoon, my friends!" The driver said in a Hiladrith lilt, taking off his hat and wiping his brow. "What needs ye this trial?"

Wilbur managed a half-smile. He knew the man. "The same questions, friend, as y'know. First-"

There was a light, sudden and sharp and completely illogical, which stopped his words. A space above the field to the right of the road leading to the gate. It was a spot at first, just a candle's worth. Then it grew and expanded and seemed to rip through the air, blocking all sight beyond it. Wilbur took a half-trill to be amazed and then roared without another thought.

"Archers ready! Close the gate!"

The portcullis slammed shut as a dozen arrows, nocked and ready, poked through the crenelations. Wilbur crouched and readied his polearm with a crisp, smooth movement. Rakeem was considerably less smooth, but he did not balk. The shimmering oval in the air was expanding now, big enough for a party of men or monsters to charge through. He couldn't see clearly to the other side, but it looked like... somewhere with grass, and trees, and a building that-

Then someone walked through. To find a stalled wagon train, a gawping driver, two spearmen leveling weapons at him, and above that...

Above all. Above ground and river and rock and stone and death and time. Looming and reaching and grasping the heavens. An ancient lady battered and bloodied but standing tall on her hill, her children still clustered about her.

Etzos.

Kasoria stepped into the light and it was-

-a hurricane of wind in half an eyes blink-

-the surface of distant suns flaring all at once, crammed into an instant-

-a jerking, coaxing, wrenching, sliding, dry and baking and shivering sensation of forward, without anything like dirt or stone or ground to anchor you-

And then, after two arcs and one season, Kasoria of Etzos was standing before the city that had birthed him once again. Feeling the familiar wind on his face, spiced with all the tastes of his life. He saw those towers and the rings rising beyond the walls. For a moment he was not himself, just the briefest of instants where he was simply a traveler long removed from his home, in the shadow of it again. As if all his journeying and estrangement had been merely a spin on his heel, now come to a stop.

Then reality, as it was want to do, cruelly pressed down on him again. The tentative smile died, and he heard... relative silence.

The roar should be deafening even from here. Yet it sounds like a grave...

Not quite. But not too much improved

Etzos was a city always in a clamor, before the invasion. A million souls all straining and hustling and working and grinding against each other like an endless avalanche of humanity. Between Lisirra's plagues and monsters and the privation and chaos that always followed war, that number had been well beyond decimated. Not merely one in ten; more like the polar opposite of that ratio. Whole swathes of the city were still quiet, even from here. Smoke stacks rose from foundries and workshops, but merely wisps of cloud compared to the belching ziggurats he remembered.

But he was home, and at least gate security was still solid.

"'ere, who're youse?"

"Rak, fuckssake..." Wilbur growled the words but Kasoria still heard them, smile returning to his face as he approached the guardsmen. "Wh-What's yer business here? You travel with this... individual?"

Smart kid.

"Aye, so I do," he said, an accent smoothed by arcs abroad suddenly jagged again without even stepping food back in the city. Mere proximity to it was enough. He turned and waved to the portal behind him. That was the agreed signal. "An' the folks 'bout t'come through, n'all."

As Wilbur processed this, Kasoria could see "it" coming. That slow realization. Memories of tavern gossip and corner scuttlebutt coming to mind. Details and features he'd heard about, attached to a single man, all coalescing into a name. He'd seen it happen many times, by that point. Even in foriegn lands, he was known... but as Winston would soon find out, what notoriety he had there was nothing compared to-

"Raggedy Man..."

Kasoria's smile became tight. Well. He had hoped he was beyond that.

Wilbur looked at the spear in his hands with something like bemusement, as if he was actually insane enough to try and use it on him. His bronzed partner looked confused, clearly new enough to the city to be out the loop, but he could already see some of those archers above them lowering their weapons. Muted whispers were breaking out among them. A couple even saluted him. Soon, word would spread.

For a moment, his smile turned nasty. Like a wolf scenting distant prey.

Good. Let them know. I have work to do.

"By the Fates!" A cultured voice from behind him barked out, and he turned to find Fagan Manclin inhale noisily. One by one, the full breadth of the Etzori delegation started to emerge from the hole in the air. "It feels bloody good to smell horse shit and coal again..."

"Woah! Es dat a SKELINGTON?!"

He had been hoping the savor this moment. Stretch it out as long as he could. Sentiment had... well, it was known to him, and indulged, but privately. Fleetingly. His profession was one where not just brutality but the appearance of its avatar was important. Reputation mattered; whimsy did not add to the patina. Now he was a bodyguard, that was doubly true. He'd sensed more than once that the mere sight of him, the realization of the name he bore, was sufficient deterrent to violence. But now he was home. He was already being enfolded with the smells and tastes and sights of the city that he loved. The last thing in the world that he did, that he had not abandoned, or thrown away.

Even the thought of her could not shake Kasoria. She would be happy that he was home. That assumed and inherited jubilation buoyed his own. But then, the fucking ferret ruined it.

Would have found out anyway.

That fact didn't help. Couldn't stop his face from darkened in the space of three heartbeats when he saw the... thing holding a spear, wearing the armor of a soldier. Staring with empty eyes lit by a deep green glow, buried in the sockets. As he tore his eyes from the sight and scanned around, he could see they were not alone. A couple of the arrows aimed at them from above were held in gloves that contained naught but bone, sighted by the sightless, or eyeless. The Cadouri was still chattering, a dull, aching annoyance, and across the delegation the same turgid morass of emotions were playing out.

What had happened? Who had ordered this? Why had it been seen as necessary? Had there been some shift in power, favoring mages? Was this the army of some new, conquering warlord? What had changed so fast, so hard, so deep, that the dead were denied their rest and dragged-

Still he chattered and chattered and the storm clouds broke across the Raggedy Man's face as he gripped his sword hilt so tight his knuckles whitened and-

"Silence!"

If he was asked, he would say he didn't mean to frighten the Cadouri. It would be a lie, of course, but he didn't much care in the telling. The bark of pure, animal aggression scared a damn many of the people watching. One or two of the skeletons even stiffened as if some programmed threat response was activated... or some kernel of mortal trepidation had been startled back into life. The murmuring across the delegation and the Scalvoris contingent stopped at once.

Wilbur and Rakeem both seemed to swallow at once, looking as if for a moment, they wished they had gods to pray to.

Kasoria filled the silence with naught but simmering, black-eyed anger. But as his grip lessened, as the blood returned, so did some shred of civility.

"Who... ordered yeh... t'use them?"

He didn't need to point; they didn't need to ask. Wilbur cleared his throat and before he could answer, another voice took over. Clearer, sharper, more... cultured, Kasoria would hazard to say, and definitely in command.

"By order of the High Council. By consensus of the Marshalls. And with the gratitude of a city given more to ghosts than the living, Mark Kasoria."

Some of his anger bled off when he saw the man marching through the gate to them; some of it returned when he saw the deference the skeletons gave him. They way they parted smoothly out of his way. The man was twenty years younger than him but his eyes looked much the same. Another veteran of Rhakros, and this one was known to all The Band arrayed behind him. They gave their own gestures of greeting, from nods and half-salutes... to Vaul spitting a stream of tobacco juice off into the ditch. The officer made a show of stamping disapproval across his lean features.

"Now, Vaul. Officer on parade and all that."

"Bollocks t'that, ser."

"Yet still with the 'ser'. My my. Someone finally house-broke you."

The rolling, dirty laughter from the veterans quashed the steaming tension in the air. Even Vaul gave a wry smile, and the officer closed to where Manclin was standing. He spoke to the man as one would a gentleman, as if they were at a cotillion or aristocratic affair. Clicking his heels and giving him a short, stiff nod.

"Fagan Manclin, I was not expecting o be on duty when your delegation returned. I am heartily glad I was."

"I see you have some history with Kasoria, here, but I am at loss as to whom you are?"

"ee's a Flightmaster. Used t'be our boss in Rhakros."

The officer grinned and tapped his lapel. Some new finery glinted there. "Shieldarm Braxton Hughes now, Mark Kasoria. Up another rank."

"So soon?"

"You have been gone quite a while."

The Raggedy Man snorted and cocked an eyebrow. "Short-handed, were they?"

"Very droll, but that had something to do with it... and something to do with..."

Kasoria took a deep breath as the sentence trailed off. Ah... so that was it. The easiest way to make up the labor shortage. They weren't just going to rely on immigrants and survivors breeding like rabbits. If raising the damned dead would put tools in hands and keep Etzos running, then for now, that would have to do. Kasoria could see the logic but something innate in him rankled at the idea. This wasn't like using magic, this was... some how dirtier. Mainly because what the Cadouri could show them, they could own. All of them. But necromancy? That required a necromancer, and if all of these were the work of one man...

Too much power. And there's only one mage in Etzos who'd have it.

Fucking Vuda.

"Allow me to escort you to the Citadel," Hughes said, gesturing with a hand that Winston could see was wood... and inlaid with ivory, apparently. "The High Council did not know when to expect you back, but I think later than... oh."

He looked behind them. Kasoria frowned, followed his gaze, and then gave a short "oh".

"Oh. Aye. Dat's our portal." He pointed down at the besuited Cadouri. "'ee did dat."

"My word."