RP:A Crown of Great and Terrible Price, Pt 3
Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc
This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.
Background
Eboric and Tenebrae continue their quest to find the achilles' heel of the monstrous Burrower, deep below the burial-hills of Venturil.
Somewhere Below the Hazy Barrows, Venturil
Tenebrae employed the barrow-mouth’s gloom to hide her concern as the wall stood fast under Eboric’s bleeding palm, barely containing an urge to make the were-bear bleed a bit more just to see if that worked… But as if it was eager to avoid such an occurrence, the edifice at last gave way – quite literally – and indeed showed them a rather steep and ill-lit decline that appeared to be swallowed by an even greater darkness. The Necromancer made a small sound of satisfaction, and paced forward to prod Eboric in the shoulder. “How’s your night vision?” She pointed to a long-dead, musty-smelling torch someone long ago had jammed in a crack in the rock. Her ability to see in almost pitch darkness was unimpaired here, where the faint glow of the moon outside still offered its grim illumination, and she peered at Eboric again… her innards still roiled with his sins, but she was yet to see the change wrought in him fully. And her not inconsiderable capacity for paranoia – or self-preservation instinct, as she thought of it – was vigilant in case of nefarious deception.
Eboric , as the walls gives way at last, turns to face Tenebrae with a grin, the expression for once not full of malicious intent. "My night vision? It is fairly good. I am part bear, after all. We tend to do well in the dark." That said, he steps into the freshly-opened hole, moving in and off to one side to allow the necromancer to enter as well.
Tenebrae made a burr of a sound at the back of her throat and grabbed the oily, malodorous torch anyway, though for now it would remain blessedly unlit. She joined Eboric a moment later in the encroaching blackness of the tunnel. On either side of the pair, the rockwork was rough-hewn and mortarless, wedges of stone in their thousands cut in slabs and stacked to keep the earth from caving it in. Now and then a larger stone was used as facing, and these had the same sort of primitive runes scratched upon them as the one outside. Tene eyed the first few, as they walked. "So. That was the Gate of the Innocent." She squinted at the warrior, dubiously. "Now there's warnings.. something about a war of old. Man against.. I can't even read this, did these people write with chisels in thier toes? The Servants of.... " the Necromancer frowned. "There's just a big picture of an eye. What do you suppose that means?"
Eboric , too, studies the runes as he walks, reading them as best he can. "I can't make much sense of them either," he finally admits. "And until I speak to Ine, I do not think I will be able to tell you what happened. Of the history of my people that went to Rynvale, and those that went to Frostmaw, I can speak at length, but the dead here will not speak of it until Ine gives his permission."
Tenebrae nodded at that, understanding more than most, and so they trudged on into the black, where the tunnel grew stuffier and more dark yet, and the runes more full of near-illegible doomsaying. Eventually, the passage widened once more, though almost all illumination was lost by them and even the night-vision of one who lived in shadow by choice was ill prepared for such lack. Tenebrae grunted a very rude word, and asked Eboric for a match.
Tene said, "Tell me about this.. Ine person. How many centuries does he go back?"
Eboric nods and, taking from his belt pouch a small bit of flint, draws his seaxe and crouches over the torch. After a few wasted sparks, the ancient pitch ignites, giving off a greasy black smoke as the warlord takes it from Tene's hand, holding it out so that the runes can be better read.
Eboric said, "I do not know the exact number of years, but the historians call it the Second Golden Age. It was then, when peace reigned for a time, that my people split, with Alimer and Ine going west with the greater part of the tribe, and Aethelred going east."
"I doubt that anyone anyone found peace here.." The sputtering torch provided them glimpses of the reason for the passage's widening - shallow shelves containing the ancient dead having crumbled under a strange sort of erosion, into rock and bone dust, though a few of the catacomb graves remained. Tene slid Eboric a questioning look, as if asking whether these were the burials of his forebears. The rune-bearing stones now only contained a single sign - that of the crude, staring Eye.
Eboric moves from shelf to shelf, carefully inspecting each one, and the carvings above or beside them. He shakes his head. "These are not my people. They may, in fact, be even older than Ine and his men. These barrows are older than I had thought, if so, and it may have been that Ine and his men came down here on a mission similar to ours." He smiles at that, and moves on from the bones. "Here's hoping that ours end on a better note."
Tenebrae offered Eboric another of those dubious looks for poking at Fate as he was.. "Whoever they were.." she had stopped walking, and was inspecting one of the very few intact graves. "...they practised Dark magic. See this?" She tugged a scrap of mummified hide toward the warrior, that he might see it clearly. The corpse's entire arm, grey and frail of bone, came with it. "These sigils. I've seen them before." And her features grew grim, as Tene recalled -where- she'd seen them. "The Forsaken Book.. of the Dead. In the chapter about Aranoch, and his banishing." Shaking the old bones into calciferous shards and grit, she freed the band and tied it around her own wrist to study later and motioned for Eboric to proceed again - with caution, said her eyes. And onward they would travel, through gloom and graves, until the very ground became littered with evidence of battle. Bones were thick underfoot, and not so very ancient as the ones in the crumbling walls. Tenebrae bent to scoop up a helmet, the skull still within it rattling dully. Her pale gaze cast about the tunnel - now more properly a sort of oblong and dead-end cavern. She gestured to the wall at the end, the two fully armoured skeletons propped against it. "Any note is better than that one." Almost, she didn't add.
Eboric shrugs, as if to say that he does not know the story, or even who Aranoch is or was. But, as Tenebrae ties the band around her arm, he steps a little further away from her. When they reach the cavern, however, he comes to an abrupt stop, staring down at the mass of bones. His eyes travel over each foot of the room, taking in the sight which has, judging by the layers of dust, been untouched for centuries, perhaps even since the bodies first fell. His gaze finally comes to rest on the two skeletons, slumped as they are against the wall. One in particular draws his eyes, and it is toward that one that he moves, carefully picking his way through the battleground.
Tenebrae noted the were-bear’s reaction to the band, and her lips bore a faint smirk as she trudged in his wake, allowing him the lead here, having guessed they'd at last found something familiar to him. And while Eboric's gaze might settle one of those warriors of hoary ages past, her own attention fell keenly on the other.
Eboric drops to one knee in front of the armored corpse, carefully inspecting it. "This is Ine's body," he says quietly. "It must be. He wears the armor of a king." He points to the body's wrists, where bracers much akin to the ones he wears himself rest.
Tenebrae did not kneel but came to halt before the second figure, though she would appraise the fleshless corpse of Eboric's far-elder with raised brows. That perusal soon shifted back to the other body, whose cowl was a layer of mold, and whose ribs still bore the weapon that killed him. She pointed to it, "And is that the seaxe of a king?" It was pretty plain what had occurred here, a slaughter in which there were few, if any, victors. Certainly, with a dead king and - Tenebrae judged, according to the cowled body's metal bands on which frightful sigils still hummed with the faintest hint of power - a dead cult leader here at the end of the passage, it bode not well for either party. "So," she said, as much to blow the dust of the dead from her tongue as anything, "It seems this may be the end of our road, bearshirt. No runic locks that I can see. Just.. death. Still want to chat to the old feller, there?" She flapped a gesture Ine's way.
Eboric glances over at the weapon, and nods in response, before looking back to his dead ancestor. "I will speak to him." He frowns, staring into the empty sockets of the skull, trapped as it is behind a helmet similar to his own. "When I was in Frostmaw," he says, half to himself, "I...don't really remember how it all happened." He shakes his head, and , nestling the torch in a crack in the floor, reaches out to remove the helmet from Ine's bones, and sets it to one side. Reaching once again, he places his hands on either side of the skull, being careful not to break it. He opens his mouth as if to speak, but a sudden chill halts him, and he remains locked in place as if frozen. Indeed, the air of the cavern seems to drop at an alarming rate, and the torch flickers as if touched by an otherwise unfelt wind.
Tenebrae was wholly unnerved by this development. Because, well, -she- was the necromancer here, right? And so, on Eboric's words of assent, she’d already begun speaking the words of Summoning, a simple work of magic, really, for one of her stature - made simpler for the fact these two had perished at each others' hand in an act of violence, and thus were morel likely to be drawn back from whatever phantasmal state they'd occupied. Tene's brow buckled in a frown - what wild card was this fool throwing into the mix, thinking he could summon the dead for himself.. The entire space was permeated with a dull and bone-numbing chill, and a faint mist rose about them all, animate bodies and otherwise. As Tenebrae felt the Summoning - which she could not cease, as such spells cannot be once begun without perilous consequence - draw down the spirit Eboric sought, an echo of dismay rang like a clap of doom in the black thing that passed for her heart. The two eldred beings had perished together, and in those dying moments had mingled blood... and in that, and their mutual hatred, had also mingled Fates. Her attention was forced away from Eboric and Ine to the second corpse, which had taken the bruise-hued glow of a restless spirit sliding back into its former frame. Superimposed over his bones, the ghostly Death-cult Mage smirked through the rictus of his grinning, meatless jaw, and his cataractoid eyes turned upon Tenebrae first. Then, with a hiss of decay and bitter ire, Baelthorn Killgaze, High Priest of Vakmatharas, looked once more upon his last and literally mortal foe.