RP:An Archipelago of Dead Trees

Background

This is part of the arc: The Mystery of the Wandering Grimoire

Blood Fountain

This historic fountain has been magically restored, though with differences. The outer wall stands three feet high in a perfect circle, and a central pedestal rises a foot above that. On this have been raised two figures carved of pure white stone, a noble Lord and Lady of proud bearing, both obviously vampires. They are dressed in elegant robes, the embroidery depicted by fine, spidery engravings on the stone itself. Around the outside of the pool are carved, in slightly less detail than the statues above, depictions of all the races that may be sired, each in a vampiric form. The pool is already filled with bland but nutritious blood, the pipes creating a hypnotic spiraling motion as it flows in a clockwise direction. To the south a dimming path leads to high and ornate iron gates, beyond which may be glimpsed the tops of tombstones glinting below the bright moon as well as several larger buildings, and to the north seems to lie another hub of activity for the citizens and visitors of Vailkrin, to judge by the stream of nobles,commoners, traders and ruffians alike that are constantly treading to and fro.

Jolie was preparing to leave for Venturil, pack on her back, strolling toward the cemetery to bid adieu to Maghu when the bone dragon himself came lurching along Hemlock Way, sightless sockets set upon the smaller, better-fleshed necromancer.

~ Ahh, there you are...~ the dragon sighed, into the back of her mind.

Jolie was by then staring at the black pages surrounding the fountain with a not-very-subtle feeling of de ja vu. "Hello, Maghu. Seems that book's been...."

A large, leather-bound grimoire appears in mid air and falls to the floor with a thud, several black pages tearing themselves free during the descent.

Thud. Speaking of the book...

Redhale 's tome had already left pages fluttering all around the city. Some had gathered in piles down alleyways, some had vanished with the breeze, and others had plastered themselves against the roads and buildings as they had at the blood fountain. Already the fountain was bordered by a dark black ring, ominous enough for any sensible person to avoid, but now the book itself was present as if to gloat about its plague of paper.

Jolie scowled at the grimoire. "You again." Her arms folded, she eyed it narrowly. "Just what are you up to you? The city is littered with your... bits and pieces."

~Be careful what you ask for, Little One ~ intoned Maghu, arcing his bone neck to lower his vast skull toward the grimoire.

"Yes, yes," Jolie replied, curtly. "Perhaps if you'd stop muttering words of warning and -did- something about it, I'd be more inclined to think it was worth rousing you from your grave."

The skeletal reptilian nudged the book with the end of his bony nose. ~As you wish...~ and lifted one mighty bone paw, bringing it down upon the book. ~There. I've captured it.~

Jolie gave the dragon a highly dubious look.

Maghu had no expression at all, being that his face was a fleshless skull.

Of course, Maghu would have been insane if he thought the book was truly captured. Considering its tendency to simply pop out of existance and appear somewhere completely different, not to mention the other strange qualities its pages had demonstrated, there was little reason to believe the book wouldn't just vanish again, or that it wasn't under the dragons claw even though any witness would claim otherwise, or even that it was really a book. Still, the object seemed content to remain still for now. Perhaps it was even enjoying the moment of rest.

Jolie said to Mahgu, “Very funny.” Though she did find it curious that grimoire was behaving itself. Taking it as a slim chance that the dragon had actually caused the momentary peace, she knelt and began to pry at the pages stuck to black paving, their edges discerned by feel alone since both were of equally dark tone. “Now, let’s see if I can’t clean up a bit.” The dragon did not smile beyond the permanent rictus millennia of rot had made of his mouth, but Jolie head the funniest feeling he was smiling, anyway.

Redhale 's pages would not be moved, not the ones on the pavement anyway. The pages still in the book however, as it lay there like some topped tombstone, began to slide out like cards being dealt from a deck. No matter how firm Maghu's grip was they slipped under his fingers as they crawled across the paving to join their brethren by the fountain.

Jolie stamped on one, then two, then three, four pages to no effect at all, and ended up looking rather like some sort of gothically-clad flamenco dancer. This amused Maghu vastly, to judge by all the chuckling she was hearing on that telepathic wavelength they shared. “Oh, very helpful,” she snapped, catching at a page that seemed to slip through her fingers like liquid ink to plaster itself on the pavers. “I’m going to have a –talk- to Redhale about all this, mark my words.”

Redhale had been surprisingly absent since the book had begun its tour of Vailkrin; how these two facts might have been related was probably a great subject of speculation. Perhaps it was Redhale's absence that meant the book was free to roam, but then there was a note indicating the masked being was aware of his spellbook's antics. Whatever the case, he wasn't around to help right now, and it was unlikely anyone else really knew why the pages seemed to want to cover the fountain in their blackness so badly, a goal which they were quickly accomplishing.

Jolie gave up trying to rip the pages free of the fountain, and was not any more content to the kick she gave the monument in a fit of sheer pique.

~So impatient, you little ones~ yawned Maghu, who was the next recipient of Jolie’s boot-toe, the clack of leather against his calcified forelimb producing another bout of mental chuckling, which in turn only made the smaller necromancer even more furious.

“Right. That’s it,” Jolie snapped, and the air would suddenly chill about her as she summoned her darkness within, ready for a fight with the tome. Maghu sat down on his bony rump to watch.

Redhale 's spellbook didn't seem bothered by the threats Jolie was making, but the pages were going about their business much more quickly, and had begun to form low walls between the buildings on either side of each street, as well as climbing up the graveyard's fence once more. If Jolie was going to launch some sort of attack, it looked like she would be doing it on their turf.

Jolie was leaking darkness like sweat, like tears, her fingers clawed upward so that they too spilled over with shadow.

The ancient dragon seemed calm enough, rising to all four limbs again. ~That won’t do you any good. Not here.~

“Not… where?” asked Jolie, through grit teeth. But a second later they’d un-grit, her mouth falling open, the darkness receding back into her like a cave-creature hiding from the light – the dragon had unslung his massive jaw, skull turning her way, and from his maw and eyes streamed a purplish light that enveloped her wholly and made Jolie’s flesh feel like it was made of crawling bugs.

~Now we’ll fit in~ said the dragon, and his own vast being shimmered with the same indigo hue. All this time, the pages had been doing their work and as they went on doing so, Jolie would be unaware of the transformation that had been apparently thrust upon her. But she could see all too clearly the one that Maghu had made – before her stood a tall and handsome elf, elegant and slender, and cold of eye as he looked her over. “Being taller suits you,” he said, with a grin.

Jolie glanced down to the black-paged ground, which seemed several inches further away than it had moments ago. “What the…?”

Maghu's disguises were cast just in time, as shortly after not only had all visible landscape been covered in dark pages, but even the sky was being blocked off by a dark paper dome. Even before the small hole directly above the fountain was closed shapes begun to swell out of the blackness, though they only fleeting images: Blurs of white racing upwards towards the dark sky, some left hanging there like pale stars. Occasionally one could catch a better glimpse of the images: A flash of sprawling branches or a clump of floating dirt, but the landscape wouldn't solidfy into anything sensible. That is until one of those objects began to rise from the blackness below them, and a churning feeling in one's stomach suggested that the images weren't rising but, in fact, the subjects were falling.

Mahgu snatched out a long-fingered elven hand to grasp Jolie by hers, his pale hair floating about him like a cloud of silver, his mouth still split to a grin, “I don’t know how many centuries it’s been since I felt like this.”

Jolie herself was staring at the hastily approaching ground, a look of horror on her face turning to a mix of relief and surprise when Mahgu’s touch slowed their fall to a gentler one. “We’re in the book again,” she gasped, glancing about her.

“You do like to state the obvious, don’t you?” laughed Mahgu.

Jolie eyed him.

The quickly approaching ground did indeed seem worrying, but as Jolie and Mahgu reached it their descent stopped without a violent splattering. Perhaps they hadn't been falling after all. However they had reached their destination it seemed they were stuck, for the piece of land they found themselves on was only a small clump of grassy dirt; about three metres in every direction was a small cliff edge and a vast, starry void. Another object occupied the island with them: A tall, spindly, completely dead tree. Its bare branches spread like claws towards the sky while its roots curled across the entire piece of land, possibly the only thing holding the dirt together.

Jolie didn’t mean to clutch –quite- so hard to Maghu, who still felt terribly bony despite his donning of elf-flesh. “This is all very queer,” she muttered, “And why is my hair…” Blinking, loosing one slightly white-knuckled hand from the elven-form dragon, she groped for an ear and found it... pointy.

“You didn’t.” Mahgu grinned. “I did.”

Jolie glanced down, to where substantial curves had taken the flatter shape more typical of elves. As she took in the liberty taken with her body-image, Mahgu was inspecting the sorry plant holding this little bit of the book-world together.

“What a sorry little plant,” he muttered, almost wishing he was not a death-mage for the first time since he was not much more than a dragonling.

The tree was clearly dead, despite the fact that the silvery glow which defined the objects in this world was brighter than usual in it. In death it seemed to serve no purpose; the island only existed to house the tree and now the tree only held its own island together, but surely it had been grown for a reason. Whoever had put the tree there was apparently eager to succeed with whatever insane plan the plant was involved with, because all around the two were hundreds more islands just like the one they stood on, though none remotely close enough to move to. Some of the trees were larger, and most a great deal smaller, but none of them were living. They all merely drifted through this void, lit by their own internal glow and what soft light made it to them from a galaxy of distant, deep red stars.

Jolie nodded to Maghu’s comment as she gazed about the pitiful ‘forest’ and its floating clump of dirt. “They might need watering?” she said, it being the first vaguely useful thing to come to mind.

“They are long past the need for water, methinks,” said Maghu, knocking on the dead trunk of the one they clung to, with a hollow ‘thunk-thunk’. Then, peering at the tree, he knocked again.

“Oh yes,” said Jolie, in her best droll tone, “Imitating a woodpecker is just the ticket. How about finding us a way out of here, instead?”

There seemed no way off the island save flinging oneself into the void, though whether they would land safely, or at all, again was at least a little uncertain. It was unfortunate, really, that Maghu had gone through the trouble of creating a disguise for the two of them when the place they had ended up this time was completely devoid of people. Or at least, mostly devoid. Far in the distance there was indeed a figure. It, and the island they set upon, were almost impossible to see because unlike the rest of the objects floating through space they did not glow; the only way to discern their shape was to spot where their blackness eclipsed another object. Because of this only a silhouette could be seen, with no sense of depth to it, but as the dark mass drifted in front of other islands and the red stars its shape became at least moderately clear: A tall, steep mountain, whose base was not much wider than Jolie and Maghu's own little piece of land, and atop that a large throne in which a figure sat slumped, visible because only because their throne faced at a 90 degree angle to Jolie and Maghu's line of sight.

Maghu gave the tree another rap of knuckles, and turned to gaze upon the shadowy shape that moved across the argent shimmer of the other clumps. “Hold on to me,” he said, abruptly, tugging the sineater closer.

Jolie, a little alarmed, threw her arms about his neck. A faint ripping sound ensued, and a pair of smoothly-leathered ebon wings unfolded from the apparent elf’s back. He craned his head about to glimpse them.

“Ahhh,” he sighed, remembering how handsome a dragon he’d once been, “If the next thing I do doesn’t work, we shall fly.” Maghu, hampered somewhat by the necromancer hanging from his neck, thrust out his hands, from which flew spidery threads of shadow that wended across the void, snaking around the trunks of the dead trees, filaments tipped by black-on-black eyes that wove a path toward that distant, dark and enthroned figure.

Redhale 's world was nothing if not unco-operative, and whether through limitations of real world physics or the bizarre laws that passed for reality here Maghu's summoned threads simply wouldn't affect the other islands. Any attempt to navigate the landscapes held within the grimoire would need to be accomplished through the rules defined there, not with outsider magic. Despite the fact that the spell didn't affect anything beyond the lonely spit of land the pair had been offered it didn't go unnoticed, as the far off figure turned his head to face them. Despite being so distant that it should have been impossible to make out anything beyond a general shape the two would find themselves able to see just about every detail of that face, as though it were only a few feet from their own. The enthroned being's head was a pure, chalky white, and thus the only shape on that mountainous island of which three dimensions could be made out. The depth in his image allowed Jolie and Maghu to note what seemed like thousands of wrinkles, impossibly deep as if great canyons had carved their way across his bald head. They weren't just the marks of age, though the being certainly had a great number of years under his belt, they were the markings of struggle, stress and defeat. Still, it was hard to feel sorry for the man when he bared his teeth, crooked and cracked and ugly, at them in a snarl, and stared at them with a pair of eyes that, instead of being made up of iris and pupils, were simply windows straight through his body and whatever objects that may have passed behind him to display those dull red stars in the great beyond. Despite all the focused detail that could have left even a great artist days to comprehend the image of this being's face was dominated by one easily recognised feature: The fact that from those gaping eye sockets ran several streams of bloody tears, disregarding gravity and winding their way across the topography of his wrinkled skin to imply the same patterns that Redhale wore upon his porcelain mask.

Jolie whispered, “Who in the hell…” But somehow, she knew. Or thought she did. “Redha…”

A long-fingered hand clamped over her mouth, and Maghu hissed in her pointed ear, “Sh. Names have power in places like these. We’ve no idea what that one might do.”

Jolie stared up into the dragon’s strangely silvered gaze. “But it is.. I think.”

Maghu retracted his darkling extrusions. “I have no power here,” he stated flatly, with a not small amount of chagrin. “Most unusual. Most.”

Redhale 's avatar slowly lifted one hand, which was also bone white but still covered in flesh, to point at the two intruders. Staring down upon them he opened his mouth to speak, though that opening revealed a similar window to his eyes, and remained gaping wide as the words he spoke were called out by the sky and the stars all around them, "Dark ones! This is not your domain, this is the end of all roads and you have not travelled enough to know the meaning of their convergence." His choice of words made it hard to tell whether Maghu's illusions had been seen through or not; on one hand they were intruding upon the world of the grimoire, on the other even the elves who occupied this world didn't seem present here, "You should not have been brought here."

Jolie frowned at the face, which resembled some sort of horrific relief map of saline-leached badlands. “But we were,” she said. “There’s these.. pages, all over my damn city.” While she knew Redhale himself, as well anyone –could- know the Dark Man, her voice was still a little tremulous. “That’s what’s bringing people in. The book, Redhale.”

At her speaking of the very name he’d warned her not to use, Maghu slapped his palm on his brow, peeking over it toward the avatar, after, in case the figure was inclined to have them eaten or broiled, or something Maghu himself would likely have done, were this –his- figment.

The figure atop the dark mountain threw his head back and bellowed a thunderous bout of laughter into the sky, loud enough to send a tremor through the branches of the dead floating forest, "Do you seek to hold power in this domain? You don't even know the meaning of the words you use. You are not ready to converse with the all knowing, the all seeing. I will not let you bring more pollution to stifle my world." His mouth drew shut and was pressed into a thin line while his still outstretched hand was turned palm up and slowly closed into a fist, the act of which caused the tree's roots to tear apart as though great sharp claws were being dragged through them.

Jolie opened her mouth to scream, but something the avatar said made her snap it shut again, before it opened once more and an entirely different sound came out, “Chuck us out, then, O great and wrinkly one!”

Maghu kicked her shin, ungently, and snatched out a hasty hand to drag Jolie out of the way of one of those rending finger gestures’ rifts.

“Go on,” she said, defiant, “Purge us from your world, so we can go and.. find a way to be worthy of the… all seeing.. thing.” This is it, she told herself, Redhale’s finally gone completely teapot.

~What do you mean.. ‘finally’~ whispered Maghu, in her mind, as he swung her about to once more avoid her being torn in half.

As the roots of the dead tree were shredded the land beneath them began to crumble, cracks carving their way through the earth beneath Jolie and Maghu's feet before falling apart and letting the pair fall right through whatever remaining root structure was left. As they fell the pair might spy a cluster of dark red crystals which had apparently been buried within their little island, but soon enough all vision would turn black as their plummet removed them from the world of the dark man.

Jolie had flung out an open hand to try to grasp one of the crystals, but soon was too concerned about falling her death to notice whether her grab had been successful. Maghu, perhaps in retaliation for her owning an overly big mouth, had let go of her, and so the necromancer – no longer in elven disguise - would plummet through the dark, screaming.

The dragon himself, a dragon once more, grew a webbing of shadow between the naked struts of his wings and did his best to glide rather than freefall.

A small, wailing necromancer appears mid-air and falls to the ground with a thud, several loud curses tearing themselves free during the descent.

A colossal bone dragon alights a little more gently, but hard enough to make all of his bones rattle.

Jolie said to Maghu, "I think there's something very wrong with Redhale."

Maghu said to Jolie, picking her up and checking her over for obvious damage with a rather hopeful expression, ~Next time, let me do the talking...~

A large, leather-bound grimoire appears in mid air and falls to the floor with a thud, several black pages tearing themselves free during the descent.