RP:Segue: The Eye of Vakmatharas, Part 1

From HollowWiki

Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc


This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.


Along Fengoth River, Venturil

It was only later, seated by the sulphurous, poison waters of the Fengoth, that Tenebrae remembered the diadem in her hand. Where and how long she’d wandered with it, on the back of the barrow-wight Guardian’s steed, she had no idea nor compunction to wonder. Tene only knew she was burdened as few creatures ever are, terribly weary and in need of time to rest and think.


But the Necromancer would find no rest here. Her mind was like the river, all gush and eddy along paths predetermined by the meandering of its boundaries – and presently it was the god-relic she held in her hand which forged that course.


The diadem, set with its unholy gem, dangled from her hand loosely -- she could not bring herself to put it down. While pale green eyes might now and then glance with desperate longing toward the river, neither could Tenebrae summon the will to throw the thing into the Fengoth’s toxic depths.


As the wight-steed stood sentry nearby, Tene stared into the eye-watering current of the river and, in the brief snatches of lucidity she managed to find, wept for her sanity. Finally, she turned that tear-reddened gaze to her mount, summoning the beast’s attention with, “I always wanted a pony.”


The creature shambled on its cracked and cloven hooves toward her, halting by her side so that the seated Necromancer was victim to drips of its foul slobberings and the dust raised by its restless churn of earth.


Tene looked up to its wet, wide nostrils, “I shall call you Tinker.”


The creature expressed no opinion on this, but merely dropped its oblong head so that it might set the bloody spheres that passed for its own gaze upon her.


“Be still” she sighed, resting her forehead against its nearest shin-bone, “Let me rest. I may soon be lost, like a paper boat in a great, dark river. And who will look after you, then? Poor thing.” She shifted, swivelled on the spot so it was her spine resting against the black mount’s leg, and lifted the diadem toward her face. “The Eye weeps for its brother, its awful twin lost so long ago, and the tears it sheds are visions…”


She was answered by a squadron of flies drawn to the wight-horse’s aura of death, which dropped from the air like pebbles of chitin in a shower upon her lap. “Just so,” she said, then took a deep breath and stared at the gelid jewel adorning the diadem.


“It has shown me such things, Tinker. And wishes now to sit upon my brow. The Eye is old and ravenous. It has not feasted for a very long time. I am poor fare for it, I fear…” she sniffed back a sob, and continued, “.. but how else will I find it a proper host? For this is the task I am charged with. It’s a conundrum, dear Tink. A puzzle, to which all possible solutions are madness and death. Yet I must…or all is lost.”


Dipping her head, the Necromancer hesitated only long enough to offer ‘Tinker’ a pat on its horrible snout before setting the diadem on her head.


Tenebrae screamed and wept, her mind almost entirely subsumed by a power she was not equipped to control, while visions came thick and fast. Time and the webs of fate from ancient days to the present became a common slurry of images, flotsam and jetsam washed to the crumbling shores of a madwoman’s dim awareness...