Trail Of Souls...

[Julius Sedaire]

Trail of Souls...​

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Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o'er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight. - H.P. Lovecraft​

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Location: Unknown Swamp World​

Time: Near Dusk​

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Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI1-E6Bm-70

The quaint world was neither back-water or cosmopolitan. It was just far enough advanced to host the standard niceties of galactic civilization in most aspects. But along the equator, there lay a strip of large, desolate islands. Centuries ago they had played host to an odd Force Cult. Some whispered they were part of a splintered colony from Dathomir. Other that they were twisted manifestations of the Force themselves, demons and angels that were given shape. Whatever they were, the marshes and swamps of the Southern most of that chain of islands had been desolate and devoid of life. Shrouded in mist and ill omens. Until a scant few years ago, when winged horrors and scaled serpents began haunting the skies and waters.

Locals had become desperately fearful, sending mercenaries bands ranging from techno-slayers from the Core to a rugged survivalist group of wayward Mandalorians. All had disappeared without a trace. The beasts had begun to cling to their mist ladened mountains, ranging less and less outward, but it had been weeks since anyone had even made landfall to the shores. Let alone penetrated the dense foliage and mountainous terrain that made up their heart and core. Desperation had seen Sith come and perish, even a brave Jedi from some Enclave or Order or the other.

In the end, the isle had been left alone in fear for a number of months, all hope lost. The inhabitants seemed on borrowed time, waiting with bated breath for the end of days. Last ditch calls had went out to the furthest reaches of the galaxy. To the sort of folk you only called upon if you truly needed them, because no one ever really wanted them at their side or in their service. Not really anyway. And the missive just happened to come to one [member="Seydon"], his expertise marking him as preeminent for such a problem, but his very nature marring the mark to a last-resort.

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[Seydon of Arda]

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J1wOx1rItFw

The pathways meandered according to generously unhinged logic. He followed the trail to the ankles of a cliff-face brushed clean of lichen and moss. Seydon scaled up, following folds of touch-smoothed stone, brushing against dead mice dens furrowed against thin crevices, casting off old magpie nests, crackling tinder bowls piled high with bleached bone. Eventually summiting over an axing jut of rock and onto a bare landing. A wall of naked trees furnished in cotton-thick mists and dampness greeted him. Dislocated thunder shook the bay beyond; a sombre wine-dark lagoon hemmed in by other, equally desiccated island masses arranged in an unknowable pattern. Seydon turned and watched spidering lightning smote and burn down a copse of knotted hardwoods. Winds were beginning to pick up. Air keened now, whistling sharp, cutting through the warmth of cloth and skin and tissue.

Seydon adjusted his cloth mask, re-appraised the island forestry waiting. Already, caprine shadows stalked in and out of focus within the mist. The Dunaan hefted the weight of the reinforced blunderbuss in one fist, Heavy Club-Chain in the right hand. He thumbed the hidden toggling switch, feeling the blunt cleaver dislocated into corded sections before resuming its prior shape. Beyond through a part in the shrubbery and low, black fronds, hoofed and furry things capered up, snorting guttural fire through scalded nostrils.

He dropped the goat-thing with a cudgel blow across its pate, jamming the blunt Club-end into another’s thorax, lashing them back with the toothed, cleaving edge. The blunderbuss howled. Potent hailstorm of warded silver bullet-ends drove it off its legs. The Club-Chain snapped back and sectioned apart, a dozen pointed partitions of old warn alchemic steel, whipping down. The caprine loosed a slimy howl and was scraped across the dirt. Seydon toed through what had been left of its form, tinged now in trimmings of warm gore.

He followed the cobble pathway up through broken country marked with skeletal basements and elderly architecture devoured by bramble. The steps and cut out brickwork were rough hewn, mashed into coarse mortar. Some railings looked serviced, rendered black by mould, bolted to drooping lantern poles projecting fitful gaslight onto the track. Exposed piping hissed and glimmered where the soil had been blown back. Every so oft, a Spawn-thing of incredulous imagination came vaulting out of the gloom. On their lonesome, in pairs, or roving gangs with fearsome speed and heady constitutions, they died. Gnashed and broken under Seydon’s Heavy Club-Chain, or tore to gristle from the blunderbuss.

The murk gently parted. On a bare apogee of rain polished granite rested a manor. It was a remnant out of an Epoch age, done in faded plaster and wood-joining, its foundations walled bricking in coloured rust, the roofing steep and still showcasing cedar shingling nailed and sealed with shines of viscous, bright tar. Fell, trembling light poured through a handful of shuttered windows. A weather vane turned, though the wind had long since died. The pathway butted against a tall set of ironwork gates overlooked by a watcher in the gatehouse. A gaping, jaw-less skull peered through an opened slot. Still flickering candles played fitful hues across a ratty uniform still buttoned to a fleshless frame. An unseen prompt clicked the wrought lock gearbox. Seydon shouldered one gate aside, taking a paved tract up toward an ivy traced portico.

He let himself through a high, thin door, after the knocker broke off in his grasp. A pungent breath of thick chemicals and unmistakable traces of physical bile walloped his senses. Arcane seals hemming the house’s foul character in broke off at this intrusion. Seydon crept into dark coatrooms, following an instinctual urging. The house felt like a lode nexus, where all the repugnant energies responsible for the hauntings of Sithspawn in the darkened seas had initially risen. He would tend to their progenitor before putting all of its horrid creations to silver and fire.

Upstairs, near the attic he guessed, came familiar humming and whistling...

[member="Ogimos"]

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wFA0bAnGSU

A hand, gaunt and withered, seemed to weave in the air of the upper attic study of the manor. All about the room was the stench of decay, and death, and threading through all those and others a keener odor. An acrid burning that matched nothing natural. Those like [member="Seydon"] who knew it would never forget it. It was the wafting vapors of madness made manifest and granted flesh. The Dark Side of the Force pulsed as if pressing against the very fabric of reality, trying to tear it's way to the material plane in a hunger for flesh, a sentience lurking in the power and presence that hung heavy in the room.

The arm connected to the hand was covered in a tattered and faded robe, bits of blood splashed all across the garment. Rents and tears scored it, with scorch marks and bits of mold that appeared to be growing from the fibers. Once the vestments were white, but they had faded to a dingy grey from time in the tepid waters of the beings home. Unwashed flesh and desperation clung to him with the burning sting of madness. Matted hair, an unrealistic crimson, hung down to the small of the figures back. Festered wounds and brands cut in Sith runes, Dathomirian sigils and devices unknown to even the Dunaan bore witness on flesh. And a fair few seemed to scream of wrongness, of a perversion of the natural order.

Beneath the mangy mane rested a face that split into a grin as it turned to face the hunter. Crooked and broken teeth, once pearly white, rotted in the skull like face. Several were missing, and a few did not seem to be his natural ivorys, and some even appeared to be filed. The cheek bones were sunken, hollow, and eyes dark and haunted in their deep recesses. Tendrils of black smoke and light seem to trail after the sorcerer as he moved, and the air around him warped and rippled like from a cloaking device or heat source. The other presence once bound so tightly to the man was gone, but the eyes...

The eyes were wrong... They were not black as the possessed, nor grey filmed as the blind. No yellow cats-eyes of one fallen. They merely were obviously absent, hollow sockets with the lids sewn shut with crude stitching, the work recent and raw, red lines across the windows to what might have been his soul, weeping purulent tears. A movement to the side, as if a predator cocking it's head in reptilian fashion to sight or hear prey better. Overly long, the silence gestated between the two friends, though what they would be counted as now was hard to say. It was clear the other had lost his handler... But the cost of that severance was not yet made plain as the figure spoke, stepping towards him with a faint rattle of a chain anchored to the middle of the floor and an arcane boundary sigil. It was plain he had done this to himself, by the way things were drawn.

"Welcome, welcome... You are late, I had to make other arrangements my friend..."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Chemistry items were scattered about displaced workbenches, burners and sooty clay triangles, vials in wood racks balanced like afterthoughts atop leaning triple-beam weight balancers, cracked ceramic flasks and a blown out pipet bulb, beside other pieces Seydon couldn’t identify. Shelves were adorned with spine rotted manuals. A heavy plastisteel and brass vat was nudged into a far corner, running hefty cabling into a stone plinth clawed with glyphic characters. The longer he glanced over the plinth, the more certain he became the whorl-like markings were never in the same spot twice. Something long and emaciated lied covered under a stained mortuary sheet atop a repurposed dissection table. Unwashed surgical instrumentation waited beside a gunk infested anti-septic bucket.

Seydon walked softly up to the desk, timbers stretching and groaning under his weight. Thin candlelight blinking from ashy wicks bloomed taller, hotter, teasing finer illumination. Shadows belonging to the homunculus thing in rat-chewed shawls writhed and cavorted back into the deeper shade. There was a taste of metallic corruption and snatches of discordant sound kept ringing from places unseen. The Dunaan looked, saw the ink spilled from a wide-set pen well drip up to the ceiling rafters. He settled the club-chain back over his shoulder and pushed the blunderbuss’ hexagonal bore up to madman’s jaw. His thumb racked the trigger-hammer back with a throaty click.

A beat. Long, glacial silence. Seydon’s eyes narrowed bright in the gloom. “...You’re dead. You’re dead and this is some madness trying to unhinge me. ...What have I let you do to yourself?”

[member="Ogimos"]

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_l4Ab5FRwM

Again came the quirks head cock and twitch... Down and to the side... If he had eyes, they would have narrowed and burned at @Seydon. Something in the face softened, but was replaced by the deranged grin a moment later as the crude firearm jutted to his chin. A moment after he finished speaking a great rolling belly laugh issued from the mad magician, and the light in the room flickered, energy playing across fingertips as he waved his hands in front of him, between Seydon and himself. Nauseating waves of unlight rippled with the electric arcs, and when the sightless gaze fixed back to the hunter and the mirth stopped, there was a naked malice as he dripped a hissing gobbet of spittle into the barrel, smirking.

"If I meant you, of all those in this plane, any harm.... You would have come to it well before this sanctuary. My children would have ended you on sight. I called to you. I warped chance as much as I dare. My power is all but spent making a new vessel to escape the contagion Obeah left in this form. You see, he fled from me over Atrisia... But the knowledge he had didn't... That, I kept, to his undying ire... And you and I, we aren't built to know what they do without a buffer..."

Here his words stuttered, and stammered, for a moment sounding small and confused, and his shoulders sagged, a look of helplessness about him.

"I stared into it... And it stared back..."

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQkvAlP8fz8

...The blunderbuss steel fell aside and Seydon went to a kneel, touching the old, cretinous thing occupying the bent chair-roller. He’d never known Ostanes to submit under anything like humility. That notion was reserved for the undeserving and commonplace, a ‘dreg emotion’ he recalled the warlock saying once. Sloshing a crystal ball held upright on a thin stem of some black glassy stem, sipping a vintage erected long before their respective age, sitting in dapper uniforms that were noetic in nature, down to threading. Ostanes in his prime, as Seydon remembered him. Before he found enlightenment in piece-meal deodates hauled up from the Force’s miasma. Slowly occupying himself pursuing research into macabre sciences and fields of arcane practice. Marrying himself to that execrable Obeah...

He took Ostanes’ hands in his own and turned the palms to face up. Advancing cellular degeneration was rotting the knuckle joints with a kind of rheumatism. The skin was blotched in places with milk-white acid scars and dyed black at the fingertips, scoured by too many hours pouring his touch over rotting manuscripts. Seydon fought back pity. Ostanes abhorred it. He’d pitied him, initially. Some silly vagrant playing at a larger game without much odd in his favour, attempting to coach the Dunaan into accepting the paths sliding between paths. Seydon stood, holstering his tools into leather catches on his coat and back. Without effort, he was picking Ostanes’ weight out of the chair and all but carrying him by the shoulder.

“Where’s your cot?” He asked. The tone brooked nothing like lip or protestation. “Did you stow your bed ‘elsewhere’ too?”

[member="Ogimos"]

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8ir8rVl2Z4

Ostanes turned his head to his old friend, for a moment the light back in his eyes. It was hardly an untainted glimmer, and there was a weariness in him that spoke of a soul-sapping depression that comes when one is taken down to base. His head shook slowly, softly, and pity seemed to radiate from him. Seydon hunted, and slew, and knew more about the creatures of the Dark than almost anyone else in the galaxy. But sometimes he proved just how little he understood the nature of his foe. That was their chief difference really, two sides of the same coin but in the end never fully meeting. Seydon was a part of it, without ever truly being it in some ways. Ostanes had never considered himself a part of the darker arts until he had literally become them. A long, trembling finger tapped the sorcerer's temple, as he addressed the idea of him sleeping with a firm head shake.






'Hell is empty, and all the devils are here'

Something seemed to flicker from on the table, a sort of weirlight, a pulsing beacon that should trip every alarm in Seydon's mind. Nothing Dark lay in that fitful light, no shadow to cloud the minds' eye. What lay under the shroud was nothing like the beasts he had hunted. But it would seethe a sort of benign wrongness. Bereft of malevolence, it would hit his senses like a skip in a long forgotten holotape, a scratch in a data-disk. A blip that was there and then quickly gone, a pulsing echoing from Ostanes himself, half a second after like the twinned action of a heart. The wizened husk of his friend would nod to it, coughing as if a bellows heaving out dust. It seemed as if breaking the boundary circle had started something off, as the power of the place itself was rapidly beginning to leach into the air in the back of the room, whilst the shrouded table seemed to stand in contrast to it somehow.

"Let me shut the tome, and finally rest... You cannot save me, my only friend. A price must be paid for what is gained..."

[member="Seydon"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

He settled Ostanes against the knurled high-chair and watched him tentatively slither a hand across the endopsychic utensil. The fell light invited prolonged gazes, whispers edging through photon waves, insidious half-words murmuring just out of coherence. He fought from striking a look over his shoulder, understanding there was nothing fundamentally there. His... His what? Friend, or colleague? Suddenly, their relation lacked as much cohesion as the pale glimmer shivering atop his rune-notched desk. ...His friend was responsible for pulling at the threading keeping reality’s skein whole and separate from the Force and the other like-planes.

Something tremulous was upsetting and warping the floor boards. Old iron nail-heads disintegrated into low rust clouds. Putrefaction leaked where inky shadows swam like pooled ink, harbouring ‘blink-and-miss-it’ expressions, liquid teeth and sucking jaws under jet eyeballs rolling and deforming as quickly as Seydon glanced. He brought the Club-Chain low, cocking back the blunderbuss hammer. For a moment, it seemed as if glyphic characters were crawling into the rafters. A bookshelf collapsed and the dozens of dog-eared tomes hissed into ash. The rain pelting at the broken window panes was on fire.

“Am I intended to bear final witness?” He turned, knocking Ostanes thinning shoulder with the blunderbuss barrel. “Is that why you sent for me, in your way? To watch you die?”

[member="Ogimos"]

 

[Julius Sedaire]

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aE2GCa-_nyU

Wasted muscles moved by an indomitable will and an intellect beyond fathom, fueled by some madness most would fear to glimpse. The desiccated corpse that was Ostanes' body stood, sloughing skin falling off in sagging waves, dissolving into dust that began to swirl around him. There was no chanting, no harsh cut words in any dialect. Figures of blinking sight, like the illusions of floating spots in the eyes, flitted around him. One by one bolts and crackles of energy leaped off of him, jumping through the air in spidery fans to swirl around the growing dervish centered around the shamble and mockery of life that stood.

Arms raised to the sky, a finger falling cracked from a hand as the wind howled through the place, blocks of stone and brick and mortar now missing from the walls. The entire mansion had been turned into a focal point, ensorcelled with spell and sigil to bind mighty energies in place. And to keep it focused on one point or person. Whilst the immaterial and material could co-exist easily, it was a free flow and exchange. To bind it as the Thamaturge had was dangerous, and eventually, the vessel would deteriorate, as it was even now. Droplets of blood, tears perhaps, flowed up from the ducts at the corner of his garish eyes.

As his world dissolved into madness, the mansion literally came apart in a thunderous crack, Boards splintered, stones exploded, and everything that was, for a moment ceased. Any standing anywhere but the singular room the two outcasts of the galaxy were would likely have been killed or driven mad. Grass and dirt simply disappeared, trees dissolving into colored motes of... Something... Everything suddenly hung frozen in the air, shuddering and vibrating with potential and waves of unease and the same heavy brooding oppression as a thunderstorm bearing down. The air became muggy and dangerously thick, as if it could be physically cut. The figure of Ostanes turned eyes up to the catastrophe of raw alchemical potential and sorcerous energy above them, and seemed to be relieved in how he relaxed.

His head turned down, non-existant gaze fixed to [member="Seydon"] for a moment, before he too seemed to shiver and was no more, the only action being a shaking of his head.

 

[Seydon of Arda]

Cacophonous forces sledged Seydon off his feet, corkscrewing him through deteriorating walling. He deposited on the grave lawns outside and cut a neat furrow through cinder, ash, and brimstone earth. The house was peeling away under cyclonic force, evaporating into nonsensical, two-dimensional motes flitting like confetti. Burning rain fell and puddled harmlessly, stinking sulphur and a kind of ozone tang up his nose. Seydon pried himself out of a debris pile, pushing off his hands, turning to see Ostanes slowly deconstructing himself at the heart of the maelstrom.

There were colours without name, sounds ripping and keening, matter and physical reality gurgling and bubbling within strange glowing geometries surrounding the Mad Ollamh. The Dunaan wondered, midst the storm and his own confusion, if Ostanes was playing himself thin across multiple realities, maybe existing to him only as a fraught shell while his essence was instead housed in someplace other. It’d be so like him, the mixture of ostentation and gloating prowess. He’d compared Seydon’s function to an obsidian scalpel: exactingly sharp and precise, but still an unknowingly blunt tool. The sorcerer wasn’t wrong.

“Ostanes!” Seydon shouted, pushing against the gale slowing turning his friend inside out. Grains of glass broke off Ostanes’ flesh, sucked down fast in a hurricane whirl, devoured by the weirlight tumbling across the rattling house floor. A skeletal arm constructed of dead light and bright shadow reached from under the weirlight’s gloom. Talons, like fractal crystals, ripped and chewed through the floorboards. Overhead, Seydon saw Ostanes gave a shake of his brow and disappear totally. He left behind a sunspot outline on Seydon’s eyeballs, like the product of glaring back at the sun a moment too long.

The Dunaan checked his blunderbuss’ load and stood amidst the sudden hanging silence. Quiet so deep it rang in his eardrums. He turned round slowly, feeling grossly uneasy. More oft, he rarely had the opportunity to battle the sorceries that made much of his prey. Ostanes dabbled in those noetic chapters with mocking, arrogant glee. Always assuring his colleagues that he had ever detail under total control. Seydon muttered a litany of oaths under his breath, wondering what the game was now.

“Ostanes! Ostanes...! ...Son of a queen, you can hear me, I know you can,” He tried goading. “...Thrice-damned whoreson, I do not have time for this.”

He levelled the blunderbuss at the weirlight still cavorting on the broken floorjoists and fired.

[member="Ogimos"]

 

[Julius Sedaire]

The sound tore through air and aether, echoing in a mind that was at once expansive beyond reason and yet focused upon a minute fraction of time and existence at once. His consciousness had rapidly expanded with the explosion of energy. Truthfully, what he had wrought was not precisely something one should meddle with. But things like caution and humility had always escaped him. Despite all the mentors he had been trained by, humility escaped him, and hubris was perhaps his first characteristic, expressed in a sly confidence and towering intellect. Others failed because they were not him, and he would succeed because he was himself. But in this moment that stretched out for eons in his thoughts, he saw himself as others did. Arrogant. Overconfident. Capable of so much because of that, but stymied from true ability by it as well.

In his waning days as the vengeance of Obeah had wreaked havoc on his body, the error had become evident. And so he had bent his mind to the task of undoing his work and healing himself. This backwater world had played out the Mad Demon's ambitions, becoming a host of unnatural things that would make most jibber in fear. But riding behind his own eyes as the spirit piloted his flesh had taught him things. Arts that he had studied as separate systems were, as Rave had begun to suspect, not really so separate. It all flowed from the same source, the same birthplace. Whether arcane Dathomirian rituals involving bones and blood or the most ascetic rituals of the Jedi Order, the rituals were merely trappings to focus the mind. To lessen the strain on the practitioner in the expression of their chosen ways. But these rituals also shackled the minds of the lesser devotees, and became limits rather than guideways to ascension.

Wheeling in a place beyond, he saw so much, comprehended his own folly and wisdom both. But that roaring sound jerked him back to the material with a sudden and inexorable cacophony of lethal intent from the Dunaan. The werelight that was his spirit flickered as the projectile launched through it. But as it flicked, it also coalesced, siphoning tufts of pure light from the very air. It grew brighter with each passing moment, flickering and fluttering in fits of futile fury, and then eventually ceasing, the light dead. But what was left behind was a form. Shapeless without anatomy, it was as if a sculptor had wrought a body from clay and left it unfinished. Nothing yet breathed or stirred within it, and most would find themselves feeling as if they had gone mad, for the thing fairly brimmed with tracings of power and life, of potential unbound. And then, it's eyes opened, flaking off dun clay shards to show wrinkled skin beneath, and eyes flowed into shape and color as if some unseen hand had picked up tool and set to finish a task.

Eventually, the being stood, and eyed the hunter, brushing a divot in it's shoulder that quickly filled in as if a bullet hadn't passed through it.

"Calm yourself... The storm has passed and I have weathered it... Lower your weapons... And thank you, thank you for coming..."

[member="Seydon"]

 

[Seydon of Arda]

The mansion house had detonated across the ploughgate grounds, strewn in a rough, broken radial. Its fabled stores of black-labelled materials secured in the shelving, heavy stone chests, in the secured, roped over vaults in the basement and sub-floor crawling space were incinerated, turning on a low breeze, ashen confetti mixing with the cinder and flickers of weightless brimtone shards.

Seydon was peppered grey across his hat and coat. He still kept the steel blunderbuss levelled square at... presumably ‘Ostanes’ chin and nose, after loading a fresh silver cartridge. The heavy club-chain rested waiting over his shoulder. That show of otherworldly physical constitution was perturbing, through a career defined by other, perturbing sights and encounters. He slowly relaxed the hammer mechanism and disarmed the rifle to his side, flicking his other wrist and snapping the club-chain back to a heavy, toothy battle cleaver. As Ostanes kept brushing mica dust off his shoulders, the Dunaan wordlessly circled him, despite a derisive sigh and exaggerated eye roll.

“If I had known?” Seydon snorted. “...Perhaps not. ...You mind cutting to the quick about what the hell this is – was – all about? Don’t tell me you were showing off again. Just to prove something.”

[member="Ostanes"]