RP:Gravewyrms and Shadows and Dragons Oh My!

This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.

Background

Recently accepted as a Novus Morior in the Necromancer's guild, Valentin had been given by his guildmistress Joliette Thorne the task of collecting 'ingredients' from the graveyard.

However, it turned out that simple bones would not entirely suffice.

Vailkrin Cemetary

Jolie was marching in time to the sound of those hopefully distant feet, eyes keen on every morbid nook and necrotic cranny in her search for the butcher.

Valentin has a rickety old wagon, and an equally rickety pair of horses. It was quite obvious the entire package was purchased on the cheap. He has a large shovel in his hands, and is surveying the grounds speculatively. The butcher's shadow has a pick cast over its shoulder, and is arrayed in a posture which conveys boredom.

Jolie rounded that last stand of funereal monuments, her gaze fixing on the wagon before alighting on Valentin. "Oh... good. There you are. How's it coming, then?"

Valentin turns and settles his heavy, inscrutable gaze on the guildmistress. "A few corpses worth'o mouldy bones while I await that drab plow to show up and point out where the big lizard bones are. Daath, you called 'im." The butcher jerks his head wagonwards.

Jolie walked toward the cart and peered in, "Not bad. I can do preliminaries with those. But yes, the large saurian skeletons are what I'm truly after." She lofted a rat-gnawed femur. "But these will do for now. Well done, Novus."

Valentin responds to the praise as much as he'd respond to a threat - with a slight shrug and contemplative scratch of his jawline's coarse stubble. The butcher's dark eyes turn back to the graveyard before him "P'raps you can tell me where t'find the big'uns, mam'selle. Random diggin' ain't gettin' us anywhere, innit." The butcher's shadow taps its foot, bouncing the shadowy pick on its shoulder.

Jolie nodded. "I have an idea. Follow me."

Deeper into the Cemetary

Jolie left Valentin to struggle with that cart .. or not.. unmindful of his own progress as she strode through the remaining sections of the boneyard. The passage of her feet was marked by the progressive decrepitude of the graves, scant pickings left for necromancers and vermin alike, until she reached a slight rise, long ago robbed of its obvious treasures. Mounting this to its rounded peak, she stopped.

Valentin had hauled himself onto the wagon, his shadow holding onto the shadows of the harnessing. It was an ungainly procession, the burly butcher guiding the wretched wagon and beasts in Jolie's wake.

Jolie called down from the low hill's earthen top. "Up here. Bring a shovel."

Valentin drops from the driver's perch, pulling the large shovel down after him without a word. Shadows congregate to skulk behind the burly man, seemingly unimpressed with their potential role in hole digging. Valentin tromps up the incline "Where'm I digging?"

Jolie, meanwhile, was stalking about on the tor, frown perched on her brow and one hand cupped, closed around something. "Rumour has it," she said, as the vampire ascended, "That the last of the great dragons came here to die. But nobody's ever discovered its tomb." With a flick of wrist, she threw the contents of her hand down. The divination bones bounced, began to roll down the slope but ceased all motion after a few feet and began tumbling back up. At length, they came to rest not far from where she stood. Jolie looked down, the frown vanishing. "And there we have it. Legends are sometimes," she intoned, a bit pompously, ".. a deal more simple than people will make out."

Valentin takes up his shovel silently in a slow and deliberate movement, a trio of shadows mirroring the motion. With grave concentration furrowing his brow, the vampiric butcher slides his shovel into the ground, and with a brawny hoist a large clump of gravel, grit, and boneash are turfed to his right-hand side away from Jolie. The trio of shadows mirror this movement, and one of those shadows' clumps of earth wings its way towards Jolie. The shadow isn't smiling, no - not a single smirk to be found. But maybe that woman will be less pompous if ducking shadowborne dirt.

Jolie was about to say something else, but was shortly silenced by a mouthful of grave-earth. Sputtering, she gesticulated wildly to the spot where the shadow had been digging, or somewhere she thought might be that place (actually nowhere near it) since she had that eldred dust in her eyes, as well. Which would probably prove unfortunate for Valentin, since the very thing the necromancer had been trying to say was ‘move your arse!’ – she’d seen the ground cracking like a great dirt egg, the tor crumbling away at its center, buckling beneath all their feet rapidly. Jolie flung herself like a cat out of a fire, blindly praying to evade the collapse. But there was that dirt to factor in, and she didn’t have the best sense of direction to begin with…

Jolie fell down a hole.

Valentin fell into shadow.

Not quite a Rabbit Hole, but down it nonetheless

Jolie was now in the dark, on her butt. "Ow.."

Falling into and out of things, Valentin mused, was becoming an annoying habit. On the upside, he'd had plenty of practice at this particular technique, and as the earth beneath him collapsed, he bound his descending essence into the shadows surrounding the hole, spreading out even as it seemed he had simply submerged into the shadow like a man sinking in quicksand.

Jolie wished she’d though of that. With the slivers of moon shining down into this apparent oubliette, she watched him descend on his shadows and sighed, picking the last of the flung dirt out of her left eye. “Well done, Novus.” Yes, that was sarcasm. With a heavy exhale she stood, and looked about them. It appeared they were inside the mound. The walls were oddly smooth, as though vitrified, and a narrow tunnel led off to the west. She glanced to Valentin, and back to the tunnel mouth. “You first.”

Valentin bluntly ignores the unveiled sarcasm as his shadow collects and drops the shovel from the hole above them. Catching the implement of earthy destruction, the burly man tromps down the tunnel. In his meaty right hand is held the shovel, while his left extends forward, tendrils of shadow forming like a corded bracelet as a dozen shadowy eyes manifest and stretch out to disappear into the darkness ahead. Valentin was the kind of man who liked to keep more than a single eye out for potential hazards. Another set of eyes appear on the back of his bowler hat, and offers a wink in Jolie's direction.

Jolie caught the glint of a wink from the back of the butcher’s head, and poked her tongue at it. Underfoot came the crunch of innumerable small bones, of rats and other scavengers which had perished here, so old and brittle that they crackled and crumbled like so many leaves. The gloom did not abate but only deepened as they left behind what scant illumination had shone upon them in the main chamber of the mound. “I say, Novus,” she whispered, trying to keep up with the man’s purposeful strides without tripping over anything. “Did that fellow you spoke of, the on who sired you, ever speak to you of the other Black Tides?”

Valentin grunts. A dilemma. Keeping his perceptions spread throughout so many points of focus took pretty much all his concentration, and here was yet another yappy person distracting him from the necessities of his experiment. Then again, the yappy person in this instance was the head of the necromancer's guild. Concessions, Valentin grudgingly acknowledged to himself, had to be made. Two thirds of the shadowy cords extending from his left hand vanish as the butcher replies "Aye, Mam'selle, the old Cenril banker did. Binding heat and chill to the essence of th'shadow. Damn handy when y'need meat kept fresh on th'way t'the meat locker."

Jolie blinked into the darkness. Banker? She’d been under the impression his ‘benefactor’ was some sort of mage... In any case, she approved of the man, right now. “Good. You could employ the Dark Fire to blaze us a little trail ahead, perhaps. A slow one, however.” In case the cold flames ate away a treasure. Or woke up a guardian.. “Perhaps one of your familiars could poke about with it, lend us a tad of something to see by?” Once more she was almost regretting the sacrifice of her sharper night vision to damnable pride.

Valentin doesn't grumble, although the damn woman seemed adamant on making things more difficult for him than they needed to be. "Th'old ponce didn't care for lighting of any kind, mam'selle. His tides were, as y'say, 'black' in ev'ry way." Still, this kind of new learning was, after all, the whole point to bothering with any of this guild and holedigging rigmarole. Valentin's expression doesn't flicker once as he swallows pride to ask "How would you make shadow produce light, mam'selle?"

Jolie would have chortled, if they weren’t down a hole. “It’s not light, precisely. Same dog, different leg. Let me show you.” She’d halted now, and the air about them would grow chill in increments, signal of the necromancer’s inner summonings of her own necromantic reserve. “Like light….” She muttered vaguely coherent syllables, her two hands cupping before her. “… but deeper, colder. Watch.” Between her hands yet a little above them a dark and purplish flicker rose and swelled into a small column of twisting energy somewhat approximating flame. While it hardly illuminated anything, it did give off a murkish glow as it fled its fleshy vessel and shot beyond the butcher to sputter out in the darkness beyond. All was still, as every bit as black as it had been, until a crackle and pop sounded and the dark flame roared to second life, so to speak, feasting on the dry bones littering the tunnel floor. A gesture, another brutal sound from the necromancer’s lips, and the Dark Fire ate its way along the passage, a gloomy will-o-wisp that left a trail of ossuary ashes in its wake.

Jolie said, "Like that, Valentin. Shall we?"

Valentin scratches a shaggy muttonchop. Earlier impressions were holding true, it seemed. The guildmistress really was the kind of woman to burn a house down just to roast a spud. Still, ruinous and wretched that purpled flame had been as a light source, the butcher could see its uses in less friendly circumstances. "Well, mam'selle, I'm all for learnin' new ways o'roastin a leg of lamb or somethin' less agreeable, but if'n it's just see'in ahead, burnin' out a path seems a bit... excessive, innit. That, an' I don't think I can pull off that stunt right now, all improv-like" Recalling the number of times the poncy master had thrown him off the castle walls for similar exercises in logic, Valentin decides to present an alternative rather than simply a counter-argument. "It's shadows, y'see? Shadows -can- see. An if you look with 'em, you can see with'em, you get me? World's a bit fuzzy and grey, mind you, a bit warped in shadow's eyes. You jus' got to bind a bit of yer own self into the shadows, send it along with'em, an' try not t'get confused." A cohesive argument, the butcher felt, for a better, less apocalyptic, way to see in the dark.

Jolie nodded. Which Valentin – or one of his shadows – might see. “I know,” she said, drolly. “But not nearly so pretty.” And that was the ‘logic’ she’d leave him to ponder as she wedged past the butcher and followed the summoned flare in its consumptive, guttering path. The tunnel had begun to broaden, she noted. Odd. Usually these things narrowed, ominously, as one progressed. The purplish flames blacklit the walls enough for even her alchemically reduced vision to make out crude carvings in the vitrified earth. Lizard-like things, and skeletons, mainly. “I believe we might be on the right path, Valentin,” he’d hear, as she trod onward into the maw of their unknown fate.

Valentin takes the opportunity to relax his own concentration on the shadows as he states in a matter-of-fact tone "Pretty's for princesses and little girls. Pretty don't cut the carcass in a butcher's shop." He would shift to let the woman pass as his shadows converge back into one, its grin largely invisible in response to her last statement. While the butcher still holds the shovel, his shadow gleefully reverts to a cleaver in eternal optimism.

Gravewyrms and Shadows and Dragons

Jolie said, "And mutton chops have never launched a thousand ships, Novus." Her grin might have rivalled the beaming shadow's were it not abruptly to vanish as the pair were led by the ominous flame into yet another chamber. This one was a good deal larger than the first. And not nearly so empty. "Bloody… hell…" whispered Jolie. For here, curled upon itself, still covered in places by tattered and mummified hide, was the very thing she'd sought, its cruel maw resting on the bones of its forearms as if lightly dozing, the bulk of it almost filling the entire space. There was a narrow gap between the dragon's remains and the walls, where various and smaller skeletons were crouched, some humanoid, some far from it. Some still held the rusted relics of weapons in their bony hands, or claws or.. whatevers. Jolie reached a trembling hand to pat the thing's near-fossilised snout. "…I never dreamed it'd be so… well-preserved.""

Jolie's guiding non-light expired with an echoing fizzle.

Valentin slowly and carefully sets the shovel down, and with the same slow care draws out his excessively large cleaver, coming to mirror the stance his shadow had already taken. He rolls his sleeves back, the flesh of those ham-hock limbs scarred with intricate sigils and runes burnt into his very flesh as an experiment by the bastard who'd necked him. "Bloody big lizard, innit. Reckon we'll need to take it to pieces for transportin'?" As the guildmistress' light fades, the outline of shadowy eyes form on the butcher's bowler hat.

Jolie shook her head. “Oh no…” Her hand rose, in a gesture of halting, her gaze remaining fixed upon the skeletal dragon. The fingers of her opposite hand scraped over stonelike scales and patches of smooth bone. “It’s perfect…” Her tone was that of a woman on whom had just been bestowed the most rare and perfect of all gems, at least until her next words, which were preceded by a hurried step backward that might just bring her crashing into Valentin or his darker projection, or both. “Did you hear that?” she hissed, reaching for her dagger. Somewhere in the cavern – or, more properly, within the confines of the bone drogon itself – a hideous slithering had begun, the sound of several score segmented and legless creatures uncoiling from the thing’s fleshless interior. Which might, just possibly, explain the presence of those –other- skeletons…

Valentin grins as the smaller woman's momentum is halted by his bulk and stable stance "Aye, mam'selle, I do. Time to open shop, is it?" Behind him, his shadow mirrors that grin, and starts skulking around the side of Valentin towards the dragon.

“Yes. Just don’t damage the… eek!” Felt, rather than seen, was a sudden slither across the top of one of Jolie’s boots, sending the bold and fearless necromancer into a frantic on-the-spot march up and down to dislodge the whatever-it-was. “Kill it!” she meeped, slashing blindly downward with her dagger through thin air. The slithering mass to follow this single scout spilled out between the slats of ribs and undulated along the packed earth below, releasing a foetid and noxious odor from myriad hag-fish-like circular maws. The gravewyrms were cometh, in numbers untold, to feast on yet more interlopers in their treasure-laden bone palace. Jolie might not be able to see them, but she knew the sound of these near-mythical beasts and knew, thus, what horrors it heralded. “Eeeeeeeep!”

Valentin didn't know what these things heralded... but he did know that hearing Jolie shriek like a little girl was going to summon an inner smile everytime he thought about it in the future. Standing still, unconcerned by the slithering, the butcher gathers shadows: a dozen gnome-sized mini-Valentins with shadow-cleavers ready. with the butcher's command, those shadows strike with the speed of darkness, shadow cleavers whisking towards the myriad worms assaulting the two necromancers. While Valentin focuses, those little cleavers will cut with the sharpness of the moon's shadow, priority set on the worms which might attempt to wrap around or slither up shapely or hairy legs.

Jolie’s sharpened heels kicked out at the nearest slither, a fat ‘pop’ resulting as steel pierced through wyrm-hide, and resulting in the fatally injured guardian coiling up to much a circular slice from her leather pants, as well as a thin disc of vulnerable skin below. Shrieking – because she hated these things with a passion a necromancer ought not own toward such terrors – the Thanatos scrambled madly into a clutter of bones, dropping her dagger with a metallic clatter to join the rusted weapons of those who’d been gnawed down to the bone before the adventuring pair. Diminutive shadows chopped relentlessly in the dark while she attempted to strangle a neckless, slithering flesheater to no avail, at the same time suffering sharp jabs and other indignities wrought by the skeletons she crushed beneath her struggling frame. “Bastard… thing….” She spat through grit teeth, “… Valentin!” The cry came as her thumbnails popped through into stinking meat and the horrible critter snapped inches from her unseeing face. “Hurry, I have an idea, but I need you to… eeeek!”

Valentin grunts. Women. "I will buy you a pretty ribbon. Because little girls like pretty things. Now, don't move." That said, Valentin concentrates on the task at hand. Practice and the overwhelming darkness of this room made it a matter of simple focus to merge with the shadows, although the effort of becoming incorporeal for even a brief period forced him to release all but two of the shadow-imps. Those two stood at Jolie's feet, gleefully engaging in shadow-butchery on the overwhelming numbers of worms. The next bit would come down to timing. Valentin released all his shadow-bindings, reappearing at Jolie's back. Unfortunately, the timing was not perfect. It takes a few seconds for him to rebind the shadows in a different pattern, time during which the worms start chewing on his legs. Ignoring this abuse of his undead flesh, Valentin begins his spell. Ugly consonants then pour from the butcher's chapped lips as Valentin binds his shadows with black flame, the runescars on his arms pulsing darkly. A circular moat of dark lava forms around Jolie and Valentin as the butcher pours willpower and concentration into the one stable binding, letting flames lap up to sear those worms stuck like leeches to his and Jolie's limbs. The smell by this point, it can be said, was quite atrocious, like that of burning sewage. This would all serve, with any luck, to buy Jolie the respite needed to recover and take the assault to her, ah, 'enemies'.

Oh My!

Jolie choked faintly on that acrid stink – and there was not a lot of air down here to begin with. Between the greasy, polluted smoke and those which still survived among the ravenous wyrms, it seemed our hapless adventurers were in a real bind. But the master necromancer – who actually did, on occasion, deign to wear a ribbon or two – was, despite her horror of the slithering throng setting upon them, not titled thus richly for no reason. As the shadow-golems hacked away at those wyrms besetting her, and black flame shrivelled the rest, she struggled upward to cling to the strut of an ancient wing, using feel to guide herself in an uncomfortable climb along its length to the jags of vertebrae on the venerable dragon-corpse’s spine. Each the size of a calf and peaked centrally with a cruel, hollow spine, she clambered to sit astride one. Once more the darkness grew chill, far below the previous level of necromantically induced cold. Wyrm, shadow and butcher alike might freeze further upon Jolie;s recitation of the horrid canta she exhaled in venomous bullets of sound, praying that she had the words right, the meter intoned correctly, every inflection perfect because bones were bones.. but these bone held ancient and vast magics, and were far more unpredictable as a result. There was a deafening creak, and another, and the chamber suddenly seemed to grow much, much smaller. The long-dead necromantic dragon was rousing from its long rest, tearing its own desiccated, papery sinews. “Valentin!” cried Jolie, through another fit of coughs. “Grab on! Quickly!”

Valentin looks at the rousing dragon and mutters in response to Jolie's suggestion "Oh, bugger that for a game of soldiers. Straight out of the Xalious Pass, that idea." With that, the butcher releases his spell, the moat of darkfire lava vanishing in an instant, leaving a circle of scorched earth and bone. Valentin's timing is better this time, if only because he is going from the complicated to the familiar, and he once more appears to sink down into the ground as his incorporeal form pools out. Binding a link to that of the dragon's shadow, Valentin will hitch a ride without the fuss of having to try and bloody well stay balanced on a flying lizardcorpse. Princess Jolie could have -that- privilege to herself.

Jolie wouldn’t notice where the butcher had put himself, since she could not see all that well down here, as well as caring a great deal less for hi s wellbeing than she did her own. Her ‘royal’ backside firmly seated on the dragon’s spiny spine, she wrapped her arms around the massive thorn of bone thereon and continued her summoning, the basic raising of skeletals taken to new and terrifying depths in this spell stolen from among the Forbidden Book’s blood-foxed pages. The dragon did not shriek, it had no lungs to draw air, but through the hollows where marrow once gelled would trill a terrible keening sound. All about them was a madness of blustering winds that could not rightly exist and groping, desperate ghosts, dying gravewyrms and the hissing of the few younglings that still hid, in embryo, in the ossified nest of the dragon’s vast frame. With a final crunch that would leave any ear within a mile ringing, the two-hundred foot once-dragon lifted its hoary, fleshless head, spines crashing through the ceiling of packed earth. In abeyance to the Thanatos’ command, it cracked through the dome of its self-made tomb like some nightmare, colossal chick erupting from its egg. Clods flew, dust rose in clouds to choke the skies as far away as Kelay, and the crackling aura of the spell would ripple out to prickle the hairs on the backs of the necks for many a mile around. Standing, finally, under the twin moons for the first time in many a millennia, the dragon spread its mummified wings and arced, shaking the stiffness of death off itself in the way a dog shakes water from its back.

*an ear-shattering crash sounds from the ancient boneyard of Vailkrin*

Valentin decides the guildmistress may be a few ribs short of a cage, then concentrates on maintaining the shadowlink until such time as it seemed safe to reform, a task which will take most of the butcher's focus.

Jolie, perched some thirty-five feet in the air at the bone-dragon’s nape, risked a glance about for the butcher. “Valentin? Valentin!” She did hope he had not been eaten by wyrms.

Valentin does not answer. No, this brief contemplative interlude would be spent ensuring the butcher's incorporeal form remains coiled in the shadows of the dragon's bones.

Jolie closed her eyes, scrunching them tight to fend off exhaustion that seeped like a numbing chill through her body, the cost of the resurrection spell revealing its toll, and forced the last of her reserves to take focus on the next phase of the spell. Phantom lights glimmered bright blots on the darkness as her will crept, predatory and keen, stalking the magics that would bind the ancient reptile's remains to her own psyche and command. Flightless as yet, the skeletal colossus shambled stiffly north, stamping down gravestones and littering the boneyard with remnant, charred vermiform bodies that dropped from its frame like vanquished parasites. As to Valentin… Jolie might spare him the ghost of a thought once they reached the cemetery gates.

Jolie gladly gave the gigantic corpse its command to halt, at the gates. Not yet revived enough to climb down, she simply clung to its vertebrae and breathed.

When the damned thing finally ceases its movements, Valentin slowly uncoils himself from the dragon's shadows, severing the link to plop down like a bucket of shadowy water tipped out to puddle on the ground. Then, carefully, the butcher releases himself from the bond of shadow, once more congealing into a corporeal presence. Looking somewhat worn out himself, Valentin scratches at a shaggy muttonchop. "Well, mam'selle, that was a bit of a to-do. S'pose I'd better go fetch the wagon, bring the bits'n'bobs around, innit."

Jolie peered down, pale-faced, at the whiskered shadowmonger. "Aye." The strain of controlling this venerable reptilian death-mage's magically protected remains was showing. And her task was far from done, yet. "I'll meet you at the pub." She murmured a short word of thanks, then, bringing her forehead to rest upon the undead beast’s bony dorsal spine.

Valentin tips his hat to the guildmistress, then trundles off to where he'd left the wagon.