RP:The Hand That Feeds (upon) You

Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc

This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.

East of the Causeway, Venturil

The sounds below had ceased, and here silence was not a blessing but a presage of disaster… The Necromancer walked the lip of the hole, widened by Azakeal's golems, pacing for want of what else to do but leap in it herself. Did she really want to do that? Sharp teeth scraped her lower lip.. so much hinged on her survival, the thing she'd not cared about or needed to, since she left this land. No birds cried, no wind blew to cool her face. The camp along the causeway to the west was silent now, too. Tene squatted down, frowning at the creak her inferior leathers gave off, and internally tossed a dice - should she follow? Or...?

Kuzial stalks the streets of Venturil with the same annoyance he has shown since given the questionable 'gift' of unlife by Tenebrae. It'd taken him an age to hunt her down, days spent amongst surface dwellers... something that leaves him in a foul mood. It also doesn't help he's still coughing up bits of fur from eating half of Daisy's tail. But he does admit that devouring the limb of the kitten was rather enjoyable.. perhaps this gift wasn't the slowly twisting dagger he thought. When he spies the necromancer finally, pacing so close to that gaping hole, his first thought is to push the bitch into it. Aye, she said no stabbing, but she didn't mention anything about that. But he doesn't, instead he walks in silence until he stands beside her and merely casts his single-eyed gaze into the opening. "And I thought Vailkrin was a decaying city.." He looks around just briefly. "If you're here on a holiday, I'm turning around and leaving again... after pushing you into that hole."

Tenebrae's face was canted down towards that gaping lack of earth, her hair a black curtain hiding first her startlement, then her silent snarl of resentment for it. Gathering herself for a few mortal beats, she drew to a stand and presented a more serene expression to the drow. "Took your time.." she said, stepping back from the hole. "I was waiting." Not for him, she didn't say, though the relief of being found by the lesser of two possible evils was near-tangible. "I was... hunting." She scrutinised him. "And you.. you seem to have survived the onset of your new life." The Empusai did not coddle their thralls, leaving the tough to live on and the weak to fall, but she had to admit a certain gladness this one had made it through to the next stage. "There's things I haven't told you."

Kuzial snorts away her words of taking his time. Whether or not he picked up on her relief or anger isn't clear, for his gaze remains looking into the hole for a long moment, before he speaks in a voice rich with undertones of twisted amusement. "Tenebrae, you could fill one of the idiot surface libraries with things you've not told me. What is it now?" Only then does he turn his gaze to regard her fully. He looks her up and down as a small smile forms on his face. "I too have been hunting, and not just you... and honestly, are you surprised?" He smiles, showing teeth that've grown sharp. Instead of two fangs within his mouth, all his teeth are growing fang-like. "It would take more than you killing me to... kill me." He grins again, then. The look isn't pleasant.

Tenebrae nodded slowly, noting the fangs so like her own. "You have no idea how true that will be, if all goes as I expect." She eyed that dirt aperture once more, "I shall soon have my manse under repair, the vats and all else needed for... " It would take too long to speak it. Instead, she held out her left arm, its hand bare, its fingers slender and tipped with short but sharp-looking nails. Tene let Kuzial get a good long look at that, before calmly instructing him to.. "Cut it off. At the wrist. As cleanly as you can." And nobody could cut more cleanly, this at least she was sure of.

Kuzial smiles the first true grin he's worn in a long, long time. He did not need to be told twice. In one motion he draws from a sheathe hidden within his armour a large and wickedly sharp dagger. He asks no questions for fear she might change her mind. Instead he simply steps forward and slashes the dagger down. It carves through her flesh with an arrogant ease; sharper than a razor and in a hand more skilled than almost any, the blow is clean and quick. Completed in a moment, followed by a dark and altogether sadistic laughter. "You have -no- idea how much I enjoyed that." Only then does he look at her face, trying to read meaning behind the request he was all too happy to complete.

Tenebrae showed him no satisfactory wince of pain. Her hand fell with a soft thud to the dry earth, and the stump bled red, stolen blood. Only after that flood ceased did she show Kuzial anything less than calm. The loss of stolen fluid made her pale, her skin looking as dry as Venturil's cursed land itself. Finally, she spoke, "Watch." Black fluid replaced the red. But among this inky seeping wormed a nest of black extrusions which wound together as they snaked out of the stump at her wrist. Fangs grit in exertion, a black sweat on her brow, Tene watched too - and the tiny, blind serpents of dark matter wound together, forming first the rectangle of a palm, then slowly the quintuple branching of a thumb and fingers. Tenebrae smiled - and it was not pleasant - as she turned the pseudo-appendage about for Kuzial to see. The remnant light in the sky peeked through its 'weave', which was loose, like unfinished basket-work. "You will be hard to maim, as well." She toed the hand that lay in the dirt - it, too had dark tendrils writhing from its severed end, though they did not form any shape but merely .. writhed. "And that... pick it up. That's the seed of your next phase of evolution, my lovely Patron." The strange, dark hand she now bore flexed. Tene finally allowed pain a flicker of acknowledgement.

Kuzial watches very carefully as Tenebrae's severed stump reforms in darkness. His single eye switches between the limb and her face very quickly, not wanting to miss a mere moment of what she is doing and the cost she must pay to do it. It is disgusting by any measure, even a drow's, yet the grin he wears doesn't fade from his ebon lips. He barely restrains himself from asking what would happen if he cut her head off, just he barely restrains from simply trying the experiment himself. But after a long moment he nods his head, throws the dagger he used into the hole - he wanted nothing to do with the tainted weapon now - before languidly bending down and taking the severed hand between two of his fingers, held only by the thumb of a limb that was once hers. When standing again he eyes the slithering, writhing tendrils of blackness for a long time before he speaks in a voice that is unconsciously quiet. "What the hell are you, lady of darkness? What the hell have you become?" He knew she was twisted and changed, but the extent of it... only now is the truth of her dawning on him, and it is giving rise to a day that he senses will involve more than just his own blood.

"I am Empusai. And I am the Queen of Shadows." Tenebrae’s voice made the words concrete, their significance unmistakable. "And if... if my husband does not find me, or I do not make my way to him.. then you will receive my legacy and you.. " The dark hand clenched, more solid now, even as the woman's face became less womanly, more monstrous. "... well, you wanted to be my equal, Stavret. Don't say you were not warned." Her grin, wide and viciously fanged, was full of high amusement. "You can now say that you carry a little part of me, wherever you go. For that's what you must do." She waved the tendrilly appendage toward her former flesh. "And you must let it feed upon you, and upon nothing else. For as I said.. it is the seed of your Making."

Kuzial knows much of the world of magic and death, more than he lets on. He studied it simply to learn how to destroy those who posses it, more than any real intellectual interest. He firmly believes that a mage's spell is a gamble whether or not death will result, where stabbing someone in the face is a surety. Yet never before had he heard of this.. Empusai, and this lack of knowledge more than anything disturbs him. "Am I to be.. Empusai also?" He eyes the limb in his hand as well as her grotesquely shifting face. "You know that even as I am bound to you, I will never be a mindless thrall. Never a slave. That is why I seek to be your equal. You understand this." He grows silent as he eyes the limb in his hand, and he cannot help but find macabre amusement in her words. "And now I carry a little part of you with me, everywhere I go.." Just briefly he toys with the thought of throwing the limb into the hole, of throwing her in straight after and fleeing as fast as he can from this woman of death, this queen of shadows and darkness.. this Empusai. But he doesn't. "And... though I already dread the answer you will give, Tenebrae," he speaks her name with a sibilant hiss, "Tell me now... how do I let it... feed upon me?" It takes all his skill not to shudder in disgust, but she would perhaps be perceptive enough to notice the effort involved.

Tenebrae did notice and tried.. really, she did... not to allow too much glee to simmer in those pale green eyes of hers. Ah, well, she tried. And deftly dodging his other questions, once more gestured to the severed hand. "Let it go hungry a night. It'll lose its shape without a consciousness binding it together, as it were. It will become hungrier, and it will do what it needs to survive. You'll see, " she blinked, a bizarre ingénue. "It will feed on you, and it will grow. Don't let it get too large, or it won't suit our purposes." She inhaled, released the breath, and managed to make that the semblance of a happy sound. "Even as a vampire, as I am, you would always be something.. lesser than I, Stavret. To be my equal.. well, it takes gumption, you might say. But I think you have that a-plenty. Or you'd never have survived stage one." Her gaze was hollowing, growing more pale, her features contorting into something barely humanoid. "And now I must feed myself, for my armour is gone, and hunger is upon me. Find me on the morrow, Kuzial. Tell me whether you have the .. gumption.. to continue, after your new pet there has fed."

Kuzial spends a long moment staring at Tenebrae. Her attempts to hide her enjoyment were not successful at all, as he's sure she knows. And instead of replying in normal words he lets out a long stream of vicious drow curses. Mostly ones involving females and their.. relations with various disgusting monsters within the Underdark. When finally done, he glares at her... and if looks could kill even those undead, Tenebrae would be six feet under with a hole bored through her head. "You know if you were anyone else, lady of darkness, I would cut your foul head from your fouler body and feed you to... anything brave enough to eat you." He snarls, "And if you show one more ounce of enjoyment over this..." He lets those words go then and there. It was Tenebrae, after all. There's no force on Hollow strong enough to stop her enjoying this torture of Kuzial. Much as he'd enjoy it were the situations reversed. "I will do as you say.. but if this.. thing.. does anything disgusting to me, I'll tear you apart..." He cannot help but grin as the thought of spending eternity tearing her apart as quick as she can 'regrow' floats through his rage-filled mind. "And if you ever use the word gumption to describe me again..." Again he leaves the threat unspoken, instead turning and stalking off, pointedly in the other direction Tenebrae would go... holding onto that hand like it were the living embodiment of the plague, which it probably is, and dreading to his damned core the days to come.