RP:How Gevurah Broke The Kraken

From HollowWiki

Part of the A Line Drawn in the Sand Arc


Remains of A Castle

The shattered remains of what once might have been a hulking castle cling to the jagged rocks overlooking the wild, foam-filled waters of the straits of Rynvale. A pair of heavily-weathered grey stone walls are the only structure remaining. Around their bases lie a great number of equally damaged stone bricks, mostly obscured by grass and moss. The occasional brick appears to show black burn marks which suggest this old castle was once torched to the ground, perhaps during a siege. A massive hole in the floor may be noted on the southeastern corner of the capacious hall. There are now no signs of the former inhabitants.


A death curse of Vakmatharas is here.


Delapidated Coral Castle

Coming in closer to this structure of substantial size, you observe that the stone of which it is made of is actually a form of coral matter, and would usually be found on the bottom of the oceans in lore, filled by colonies of mermaids and mermen wielding tridents. You're urged to nearly laugh at the thought of mermaids. There are multiple orifices throughout the structure vertically, like doorways designed as entry points. As you stand amongst the sand, you notice a trail coming from the base of this bastion of sea origin snaking along the ground; brilliant white and black sands inherently organized by natural forces. For something so simple really, looking like a giant multi-colored sand dollar, it's quite astonishingly beautiful.


The sun had not yet risen above the horizon when Mac eventually entered warmer waters just off the coast of Cenril. Signs of land-walker life were few at this hour – here and there bobbed small fishing vessels, independent fisherman out to fill their nets before the larger fishing fleets took to sail for the day. The kraken had spent the past few days ensconced in his natural state, on the floor of the inky deeps between the mainland and eastern isles. Though the urge to keep exploring the source of the disturbances that had woken him from his long rest was strong, Mac needed respite from the rigors of wearing a human form, the intense pressure of it wearing him down. And, he’d reluctantly admitted to himself after his sojourn with the Uyeer on the shores of Horseshoe Bay, the memories of his beloved Evriale that had risen from his own inner inner depths of late were weighing on him, too.. But as much he needed that succour, he’d found the Black Gulf no longer serene, for those memories ate away at him like a throng of starving hagfish.. Evriale! Her loss was still, even after all these ages, a wound that opened too easily… her song was still as fresh in his mind as the day he’d first sung it to her in the mazey coral gardens of the castle in Cenril’s southern waters. He was drawn there now, like a spawning squid to a distant moon, a dutile but irresistible call that echoed up from the aeons-long void in which he’s kept it, that song… his greatest and only treasure. Or rather, what remnant of her remained in the music, those ancient words….

The kraken wore manflesh like a glove immensely too small, as he broke through the ocean’s choppy ceiling about a mile from the castle’s gardens. Something wasn’t right… where once the cultured wonders of the castle’s reef gave way a plenitude of wild corals, this oceanic wilderness was now a grey ghost of itself.. The brilliant colors and thronging life were too far abated, even given the ages since he’d swum there, as if the entire region was afflicted with some ghastly sickness.. Where once great shoals of fish silvered the sea, a scant few deformed and dying creatures swam in crippled circles, and the vast banks of coral were bleached deathly pale. But it wasn’t only that, there was a.. sense.. to the place, some deep foreboding of peril that crawled upon the kraken like a swarm of pernicious sea-lice.. not only on his skin but somehow under it, burrowing down into his very essence.

But if the sick reef saddened and alarmed him, it was the sight of the once-resplendent castle that shattered the Old One’s trio of hearts… for where once its tallest coral spires had barely touched the surface, now the entire place was above the level of the sea – and worse, was shattered, defiled… Filled with dismay and loathing, only a part of which was caused by the mysterious aura of poison radiating from the north, Mac broached the shore and with a heavy tread walked the beach that was once the oceanic courtyard of the keep. What could have wrought this horror? What has defiled this ancient place… and with it, the memory of Evriale? He could not summon even the first note of her song amid this abomination, as though the music itself recoiled from it. Littering the sands, the corpses of fish and beached dolphins, a solitary octopus that had evidently gone mad and torn off all but one of its own limbs..

The kraken’s pearly eye was dark as the abyss itself as he forced one foot in front of the other across this desolation, toward the dry ruin. Evriale… whatever, whoever had robbed him of her song, her memory, had ruined this bastion of ages past… well, he would find them… And they would pay!


The curse saps the vitality of all living things, save those of Vakmatharas’s highest priests. Death comes to all, albeit at different paces.The average human would perish after 20 minutes of exposure to the curse. An avian would exceed two hours. How long until the kraken is done? His fate lines like tentacles, so ancient and mangled, they would take far longer to untangle, stretch, and snap. What more, the kraken’s thick magic is like a caul draped over the monstrous life inside. The death magic rubs up against that caul first, a pumice stone working to bore a hole through which Vakmatharas can slip his skeletal hand. Perhaps this is the sea lice that Mcracken feels writhing beneath his skin. Inside the castle there is movement. A short dark figure in a cape scuttles in and out of the sanctuary (not yet burnt, as this scene predates Ranok’s vengeful arsony). The figure seems unencumbered by the curse. Gray skin, white hair, red eyes that glow in the dark, feminine but harsh in both appearance and demeanor. She rifles through tomes. Gold lettering on their spines reveal that the books pertain to astral projection and walking, interplanar magic, and the arcano-science of portals. Her back is to Mcracken.


Mcracken feels it, the creeping evil of that malevolent geis, gnawing away at him more fervently with every step his bare feet take across the lifeless sands. Seaside grasses have withered to rotten clumps adorned with the pitiful remains of putrefying gulls. Oh, this human frame! The benefits it affords his search for answers are now far outweighed by its weakness, for in his kraken form Mac could have surged into the near-shallows and even from the distance across the beach smashed the horror this place had become into rubble and dust… But such a change took too many hours – and there was still hope that this former sanctuary and keep might be cleansed… restored.. But cleansed from what? His black-pearl eye itched, losing all its sheen as he spotted the robed figure stalking about the ruin, with an ease of motion that Mac himself was rapidly losing – the closer he came to the beached castle, the more he sensed arcane sickness picking at the layers of him like a carrion worm seeking entry to the soft meat below. Every step felt like his last.. hope waned, too and began to spoil like milk, turning to sour despair, a taste of ashes on his andro-form tongue. Many was the century since he’d taken a life as he wished to now, to flay the skin off the cowled figure, salt the wounds until it confessed the crime and revealed the cure. Shatter its bones into splinters and sing its blood out of the veins… But when he opened his mouth, no sound came. The kraken stood there on the sand, a sorry scarecrow of a man to more then merely sight.


Gevurah , bent over a book and crouched on the balls of her feet, jerks upright and turns her chin over her shoulder like a deer who has heard the snap of a twig. She heard nothing, but felt enough. The death magic warps and plummets around arcane pull of something titanically powerful, as if Mcracken were an anvil dropped on a trampoline. Gevurah feels like a marble spinning around that sunken weight, though she stays perfectly still. The sensation twangs her divine core, disorients her. Because he is so powerful and disruptive to the curse, Gevurah can place him roughly by sense alone. The priestess shuts her eyes, focuses on his movement, and steadies the dizzying sensation between her temporal lobes. Having taken command of herself again, she rises quickly and pivots towards Mcracken, her posture large and piwafwi fanned slightly wide not unlike a cobra splaying its hood. “Who are you,” she demands in a sonorous voice accustomed to leading prayer in cavernous chambers, and bossing servants around. Indeed, she doesn’t even intone her questions as such. If she is frightened (maybe a little), the kraken would be hard pressed to detect it.


Mcracken’s gaze was blurred as if afflicted suddenly with cataracts; his manflesh-eyelids opened and closed in a vain attempt to clear his vision, to better spy out the one he presumed was the instigator of this atrocity. Blink as he might, the figure remained unclear to him.. But then it… she… spoke, and all thanks be to Selene that this sickness had not yet eroded his ability to hear the sound of her, to feel the timbre of her, taste it like an auditory scent in the wind.. Oh, he had her number now, one he’d not forget until she was reduced to bloody pulp on his tentacled grasp. The very thought summoned him from the mire of despair sucking at his will, his strength. Mac parted his lips and croaked something, which probably sounded like a name but was not. Whether Gevurah heard it correctly or otherwise mattered nothing to him. Wheezing the sounds out in reluctant syllabic bites, he continued, “Tis my.. pleasure, m’lady, to meet thee thus… on my morning stroll. Ah, but forgive.. me, I knowest not thy name, that it may spill more sweetly from my tongue than mere “M’Lady’s” could ever hope.” His joints creaked with the sound of old ropes as his raggedy frame doubled over in the semblance of a courteous bow. The arcane maelstrom was pounding him as violent waves break on rocks, in time eroding them to sand, then particles of nothing. Though he withstood it as few creatures could, Mac knew he must go from this place soon, lest its poison overwhelm him where he stood – but hopefully not before this wretch of a woman gave him her name.


Gevurah ‘s stare narrows on the weakened creature, who, to her, is obviously not human despite the skin suit. On rare occasion does Gevurah meet a malevolent soul that does not already know her legendary name, and thank Vakmatharas for small miracles (and big ones, like this curse). Magic tethered to names can be quite powerful, and paranoia is a genetic trait passed down from father to daughter. Seeing no benefit to giving up her name now, she stalls. “You seem unwell,” she says in her thickly accented common. As she speaks she pulls a black bronze reed out of an enchanted satchel hidden beneath her piwafwi. The mouthpiece is a crude skull. She whispers a prayer then blows 3 notes into the reed. She is no bard, but Vakmatharas doesn’t demand musicians, he demands souls. The reed plays a song much longer than the three notes Gevurah blew into it. Death as pied paper, Gevurah its conductor, beckoning Mcracken, “Come, lay your weary head inside.” Suddenly inspiration strikes as swift of Vakmatharas’s scythe. “My name is Laezila.” Plan A: Kill this beast here. The enticing song still plays. Plan B: It escapes, and watch what happens to Laezila, Gevurah’s most personal enemy.


While the drow may swim in dark arcane magic like a fish, she’d gone and dabbled her toes in water that wholly belonged Mac, now. He could not have planned it better were his mind clear enough to have done so, rather than fogged by the efforts of merely keeping upright, and mostly intact.. for as those seductive, treacherous notes left the pipe and entered the realm of his hearing, Mac’s own arcane power reached for them, snatching up the serpentine trio of tones the way a sailor catches loose ropes. Drawing on deep reserves that were already strained from the act of self-protection, the kraken twisted the eerie music into knots that suited his own purpose, and while the redolent evil had stolen the power from his human throat, still he had lips to purse… The notes convoluted, slippery as enraged eels, but the whistle that sounded from the kraken now was the net which snared them, forced them do his bidding. If they were hounds, they’d have turned on their mistress slavering and gnashing their teeth. But given that they were sounds, they snaked through the air between Mac and the drow in the time it took for three hearts to beat… the music now like tentacles, prodding nooks and crannies, seeking control of some small, subtle measure. If this were not a deadly game, and this were not a pit of death, and there were passers-by who would not wither to husks or die of strokes instantly, caught in the midst of this strange battle, then they would have perhaps smile to see a fine lady playing a tune on her pipes, while a random raggedy hobo accompanied her with the only instrument he could likely afford. ~Tell him~ the music whispered,. ~Tell him thy truthful name, for he canst hear a lie! Lo, for he can taste it on the very wind.. Thy proud name, thy fearful name, thy truest name that shouldst not lurk like a lowly worm in a shadow ~


Gevurah gasps as she feels control of the song slipping from her arcane grasp. She resists the sea monster both physically and mentally. Her teeth clench like she means to make her own spit diamonds. Thoughts jostle against each other like tectonic plates, her name hot magma beneath the seams between her thoughts, threatening to spill forth. His song sears her brain, for even weakened the kraken is power. As she resists she pulls a handful of iron dust out of her satchel to try and cast another spell, but it’s impossible with the pressure in her mind. ~The proud name, the fearful name.~ The house name pounds against the back of her teeth. Her given name she has yet to make legendary, proud, fearsome. The proud name seethes out between the gap in her teeth like a geyser, all hiss and pressure: “D’Artes.” She quickly swipes the iron dust over the bronze reed and it melts and reforms as a ceremonial dagger of Vakmatharas. She stabs forward towards the kraken’s heart (presumably, an educated guess at human anatomy, hoping for the best death). Whether she lands a blow--anywhere-- or not, she’ll back off physically for she is not a melee combatant. Either she releases the blade in his flesh, and lets the death magic worked its diseased wonder, or, if she misses, she’ll keep the dagger in her retreat, as she levitates upwards.


Mcracken has three hearts, being what he is, and it was just as well for him that none of this beating trio were anywhere near the location where a human heart would generally reside – for the drow’s plunging dagger was swiftly sheathed up to its new-forged hilt in the meat of the kraken’s chest. He stood there, one green eye turned gray as a violent sea, the formerly pearly one a dead a lump of coal, staring at the blurred shape of Gevurah while the drow retreated. That gaze held a promise – of a blood mist, a shrapnel explosion of sundered bone.. Around the knife’s hilt leaked the pale blue lymph that serves the kraken as blood, for it contains none of the iron that makes a human’s sanguine. Indeed, the only iron in his body at present was that dagger… In any case, he seemed to suffer no ill effect at all from it. Not at first.. but even as his mind formulated another thin tune to whistle, one he’d use to draw the blurred, cowled figure close again, close enough to maybe break her eardrums open, shatter a vein in her head… even as weak as he was, surely he could muster that? No, the effects of the knife came not at first but moments after; the poison leeched into him and the kraken reeled on his feet, gangly frame swaying. All but blinded, sick and enfeebled, he had no choice but to make a retreat of his own, heavy steps that would take him backwards toward the toxin-wracked waters. He could not linger here. He would go, and he would heal. And then… he’d be back.


Witchy Gevurah, high priestess in training, reagent-based sorceress by preference and taste, always hunts for the next ingredient to add to her spells. Wisdom cautions her to let the powerful creature go for she is ill-prepared for this fight, but her greed fiends that blue ichor. She cries out a word in drow. A giant spider climbs over the coral wall to its master and scuttles past. Gevurah grabs onto the hard reign and in one fluid motion mounts the charging beast that gives the kraken chase. Her hand dips beneath her piwafwi, into her satchel, emerges with thick spider webs that cling to her fingers and tremble by some power that cannot be explained by the jostling of her mount. The priestess whispers words of power in her native tongue. The sticky tendrils thicken, elongate, and fuse into one long coil. She snaps it like a whip at Mcracken's legs, as near to him as possible to make it difficult to evade. The spider web anchors itself to seemingly nothing, the air perhaps, and goes taut like a trip wire across Mcracken's legs. It's not enchanted to do any additional damage. It doesn't burn or cut. It feels like rope, used simply as rope, in the hopes of tripping him so that some of his blue blood may be smeared on the ground for Gevurah to collect. She doesn't need very much. Just a taste.


The kraken could barely see, but his sense of hearing was as yet not too dulled to miss the wicked ~snap!~ of the witch’s silken rope… right before he tripped backward over it and went sprawling on his butt on the sand. In the process of this, the dagger Gevurah had jammed into his flesh was knocked loose and fell with a grainy thud to the beach. Mac grappled for it, thinking perhaps the weapon itself might hold a few answers about the nature of this foul D’Artes creature, and as he groped about, eventually closing his fingers on it, some of his precious aquamarine-hued blood did in fact become smeared on the sand. On his back like an upturned turtle and demi-blind, he was nevertheless at some remove from the curse’s full brunt now and while his eyes weren’t clearing up any yet, an experimental rumble in his throat marked at least a bvery slight return of voice. Squinting his mismatched gaze at the crablike dark blob that was Gevurah on spider-back, Mac mistook the shape for a whole creature.. Which was just as well for the drow, for when the human-formed kraken unslung his jaw, it was mainly her spider at which was aimed a brutal sub- and super-sonic pulse, a shattering choir of frequencies. He couldn’t see what effect it had or didn’t have, though – not only because of his visual impairment, but also because after making that sound he flipped over, dagger in hand and staggered into the waters… They were no relief to him, sick as they were, but at least he didn’t need his eyes to get around underwater, and motion came with far greater ease.


The spider screeches its own ear-piercing wail, though it is no bard and has no magic, and yet its suffering can be felt. The mount hurls through the air, and throws Gevurah off its thorax. The high priestess lands on her back, and for a moment she and the kraken are in the same position, a couple yards apart, fumbling to stand quicker than the other, both with the intention too flee and regroup, figure out the other's secrets, strike when better equipped. Preparations start immediately, once the kraken flees. She approaches the smeared blood at a regal pace to summon once more the dignity that shook off her when she was thrown. Not having a glass vial handy, the witch takes a handful of clean sand, speaks to it an incantation, and shapes it into a marbled aquamarine, pink, and sand-colored seaglass vial. In this she collects the blue blood, then returns to Halbyrn. The mount's injury tugs on what few filaments of feeling remain in her heart. Those feelings are the frustrating dregs of her race's ancestry in the ancient elves. Although the race forked apart millennia ago, the drow race has not yet exorcised all of the trash traits of the foolish elves. The drow hates that she cares, even if only a little. The animal, who she has had since childhood, is not yet dead, but will be soon. She waits there until it passes, offering no comfort save her stiff presence. She doesn't caress it to ease its pain, nor does she wants to; she's still a drow. That instinct is absent. Once the creature passes, she glances over her shoulder to ensure no one is watching. It's foolish, but she does it. She mutters the final rite of Vakmatharas over the mount, then leaves it there to rot. She returns to the castle.


Mcracken eased into the deeps off Rynvale, the way a battle-sore man eases into a warm tub, the volcanic vents in the ocean floor nearby to his preferred abyssal trench providing the kraken with a measure of comfort for his wounds, both physical and .. otherwise. He longed to shed the incredibly cramped human frame he wore to walk the dry world and stretch out into half-mile pincer-tipped tentacles, a body-head like an overblown dirigible, and sink into a watery night almost as deep as the one above… He was so weary, though the wound he bore from Gevurah’s potent little dagger was slight. He’d suffered vastly larger injuries, fought battles a thousand times as fierce, and not felt as tired, sore and heartsick as he did right now. Warmed by the hydrothermal currents wafting from the hidden magma-filled vents, Mac gratefully rolled off the Cenril-side shelf into the waiting maw of the Gulf. Sinking, sinking… there was a never a need to force his flesh to unfold into its natural shape, it felt how he imagined a dry-world seed may feel, if it bloomed into a mighty oak in just a few hours. The very process always made him feel better… But as he sank.. and sank.. it became apparent to Mac that something wasn’t right. He wasn’t unfolding. He was still cramped up inside that man-shape, and the pressure of the fathomless depths was pressing on him too….for he had not the mass or correct internal pressure to offset it. His trio of hearts were hammering, his andro-form limbs flailed – Great Mother of Oceans, he had to get closer to the surface again, lest he be crushed by the immense fist of water that usually was his favoured retreat! Gradually, as he kicked his way back to the shelf, Mac came to the understanding of at least part of what had really happened to him back on that beach… Nothing good. And now something much, much worse…

D’Artes! The name seethed like venom across his tongue. He would find this creature, if he had not already killed it. And wring it like a sponge, until it released him from its curse! But first…. he needed rest, at least such poor rest as his accursed flesh and the volcanic shallows would allow him.