RP:The Rise of the Burrower

Part of the Venturil's Bane Arc

This is a Necromancer's Guild RP.

Venturil

The panic which gathered as Tenebrae passed down the dry earth of Venturil's causeway was nothing compared to the mayhem which ensued when the very earth below her slightly-dangling feet began to shake. Poor farmers and itinerant workers, the families of guards and travellers... all fled to the city, where an outcry was made. Some assumed it a natural convulsion of the earth, a few guessed the cause to be something unnatural. But those very few who'd witnessed the necromancer's passing, the withering of crops as she floated past their fields, the howling of dogs, the horrible injuries which came to those who attempted to halt her progress -- those people took up a cry of 'witch!" which spread though the crowd like a plague of the mind and heart, until all were clamouring that something be done about her. Meanwhile, parts of fields and roads were collapsing in on themselves, and great plumes of dust rose into the air north of the city. Amid the mayhem, a tiny woman with dark hair, her feet barely scraping the ground as she floated, white-eyed and grinning madly, toward the sour and sallow lands to the south.

Eboric approaches swiftly up the causeway, armed men at his back. Spurred on by the reports of those few outlying citizens that chose not to evacuate months prior, the king moves swiftly, anger already knitting his heavy brows. At the sight of Tenebrae, however, he pulls up sharply, a raised hand halting the troops behind. The werebear takes a moment to assess the situation before spurring his dead horse onward, approaching the floating woman who, at last report, was entirely insane.

"So," Eboric says when he is near enough to be heard, "you return."

Tenebrae did not reply - and when her face swung Eboric's way, revealing the white eyes and slack mouth, he'd plainly see that the necromancer herself wasn't home, so to speak.. Certainly, the voice which rumbled over her lips, though her mouth barely moved at all, did not belong to the woman Eboric knew. ".....I... return...." Was it her, playing some sort of vile joke? If not, was whoever-it-was mocking the King? Whatever questions Eboric might have had probably became a secondary concern, when the woman's small, pale hand rose, her arm as lax as a puppet's on a string, and she flicked her fingers -- and the King's men, horses and all, either fled or fell down... Perhaps the King had enough protection about him to save him sharing the fate of the fallen, who lay as husks of men and beasts, mere shrivelled mummies of themselves.. All the while, and now that woman was floating on her way again, could be heard a susurrus of insane whispers, as if the occupants of a lunatic asylum in the dead of night all joined together in voice, though only one set of lips moved: "I... return... I return..."

Eboric 's sword clears its sheath the moment the horrific voice sounds, and perhaps it is Eidhur's blade that protects him from the vile magic that routs and decimates his troops. The black blade drinks in the waning sunlight, held unwaveringly to the front as the barbaric king studies the necromancer he once knew. "You are not welcome here any longer," he says, his voice as firm as the stone of the causeway. "It would be better for you to return to wherever you have been these past months."

Tenebrae - or the force presently animating her – simply floated forward, and Eboric might find his sword trembling as the very steel it’s made of began to vibrate, which is what all weapons drawn against Tene so far have done – right before they shattered into shrapnel. Indeed, the pressure exerted on Eboric as she moved toward him – the only barrier now to her passing south and east – would feel like a giant fist curled about him, squeezing… Rock, hard place. Something had to give – and if anyone was left to observe this spectacle, they’d probably be laying their coin on the witch.

A nearby farmhouse buckles and then falls into a crevice which has appeared below its foundations..

Eboric cannot help but feel the reaction in the metal itself, only the soul-might of the weapon maintaining its integrity against the horrendous power facing the king. Nor can he miss the pressure, although thankfully the immortal steed keeps calm, unworried by the affairs of men. "Hold," the werebear commands through gritted teeth. "Hold, and remember who it was that brought you the power you have." If the king is frightened, it does not show, and he even coaxes his horse forward a step, in defiance.

The land itself was screaming now – or that was the impression given, by the horrendous groans and cracks given off while entire portions of the surrounding earth, the few abandoned structures, the withered crops beyond them, began to collapse - as though the partner to the great invisible fist clamping around Eboric was punching holes in his nation. The woman – surely by now, the King must know that whatever is in control of her is not the necromancer herself – opened her mouth wide, though the rest of her face remained wholly static, and from it leaked a horrendous noise, dry and brutal on the ears, staccato and dire. Laughter? The gem on her head was black as a million midnights, black as the unfathomable spaces between and beyond the stars, and for a moment it seemed to draw Eboric’s attention to itself the way a black hole draws matter.. and into the warrior’s mind came an awful clamour, a cacophony of whispers, insensible yet clear somehow in meaning. Tenebrae would pass, or the King would join the withered carcasses the woman hovered over now….

Perhaps adding to this sense, a great crash sounded from the south-east, a massive boom of a noise, and the ground below Eboric shook violently. There were screams – horses and men – for either one of his own patrols or some unfortunates from Chartsend had just met another monster.. The Burrower was awakening, to the call of its long-perished master, to the source of its own foul flesh… and it was hungry.

Eboric , mesmerized into inaction by the blackness of the gem, is only stirred from that state by the sound of screaming. With a curse, he wheels his horse, spurring it on after the possessed necromancer. One of his patrols arrives, coming in from the west in response to the sound. Eboric dispatches the majority of them to the south, where they can evacuate those few citizens and the soldiers quartered in the city, while the king himself and a few others follow the floating necromancer, trying their best to ignore the destruction in her wake.

The city was soon swarming, not only with the stubborn remnants of Venturil’s farming community and other refugees, but with a stampede of panicked animals bolting south – domestic creatures broken out or set free from their stalls, vermin scurrying to safety from homesteads long left to rot along with the land which long ago failed them, even some wildlife from the gnarled forests went trampling through the streets, less afraid of men now than of the creeping horror that overwhelmed them north of the gates. Chaos and mayhem, and at the root of it all one tiny woman.. though of course, she had practically nothing to do with things, at present. Her body was hauled along more rapidly now, the susurrus of whispers escaping her lips growing thick as she approached the desiccated well and the sickly lands surrounding it. The earth below became treacherous, great cracks appearing in the barren dust of the road. Whatever purpose this entity had, it was close to its goal now, and the very air crackled and moaned with the passing of its avatar.

Eboric follows along, sending his remaining men out with a string of orders. Within the city, the troops organize the civilians, herding them south to the refuge built near the stables. It is not long before only Eboric follows in the wake of destruction, guiding his horse around the deeper cracks in the earth. The dark sword, Eidhur, hangs ready in his hand, and he absently runs a finger over the runes engraved there, his face set into a purposeful grimace.

And he was ignored, for what could one werebear and his moldy old runes achieve, against such might as was working through the necromancer? Let alone the thing it called now from below… Tene’s head whipped back, her fanged mouth stretching open like a child trying to swallow raindrops – but to compare this act with such innocence is a dire blasphemy, for what poured forth was the language of the most ancient black magics, sounds that blistered the soul strung together into what could only loosely be termed words, words that had been banished from all use untold centuries before when the last creature to speak them aloud was shattered and flung into oblivion.. Vast portions of land caved in to the east, the solitary farmhouse still barely standing on its rotting stumps a sudden clatter of mildewed wood as it buckled inward on itself, collapsing into a newborn sink-hole. And from these cracks and rents in the blasted earth erupted the first wave of darkly mottled tentacles, blind things which groped upward and shrank back from the dying sunlight as if burned. The Burrower was waking now from endless, mindless dreams, stretching out, reaching into the world it had vampirised from deep below for so many centuries. Clots of hard clay peppered the air as the thing’s innumerable limbs burst free, and Tenebrae rising above it slowly, drifting upward, her battered body rotating, her mouth a tiny cave from which swarmed like locusts those resurrected, long-banished cantrips that looked to bring about nothing less than the utter destruction of Eboric’s new realm.

Eboric curses under his breath at the reappearance of the monster he had seen once before. He lifts Eidhur up, pointing the sword at the mass of tentacles before him. For a time, nothing happens, and the warlord simply stares at the monster, sword upraised in mute challenge. Then, as the sword seems to drink in the light, the first of the dead arrive. They come from the burial grounds to the west, the souls of the dead responding to the needs of the living. They arrive with the weapons and armor with which they were buried, some mounted, some on foot. They assemble in a line of interlocked, spectral shields, formed up behind Eboric. Beside him, two other men appear, both on foot. The two bear similar features, although one is dressed in heavy furs, and the other in lighter garb. Alimer and Ine, two of three brothers long dead. They begin to chant as one, the rhythmic song soon picked up by their men, a galdor designed by Ine to attack the Burrower, to disturb its deepest tunnels and forcibly loosen its grip on the land.

Surely, one would imagine, the dead would be little use against the avatar of Vakmatharas himself? Surely, it would stand to reason that these long-perished warriors would prove only fodder for the entity holding Tenebrae aloft, yet – Eboric’s ancestors were the very men who’d aided in containing the thing, in the distant days of yore when Aranoch had blackened the land with his hideous presence. They too had words of power, words which bound the blasphemies screaming from the dry lips of the necromancer, words which once had kept this nation safe and, from the grim dead lips of those same men now, perhaps would again. For though the Burrower had grown to monstrous proportion in its millennial slumber, leeching all goodness from the place, it had also been deeply corrupted by the very artifacts it had originally been set to guard… One of which Tene bore on her brow, the other – Eboric might glimpse it, a sudden bit of shine that wasn’t really light peeking from the roil of serpentine extrusions that came writhing toward him now, and his undead army of runesmiths. Some sort of staff, perhaps a sceptre, being passed from limb to limb before being devoured back into the main mass of the thing, a bloated sack of protoflesh and wrath that was ripping itself loose from the ground now, well-fed and almost awake enough for its cunning yet vestigial mind to figure out what was causing it pain… It remembered such sensation from its former existence, the searing magics wrought by eldred rune-song. Limbs whipped, lashed out – look out, Eboric! – bones shattered, frightful squeals rent the air, and all the while Tenebrae hovered above the mayhem, though it seemed she’d sunk a little lower since the ghosts of Eboric’s past had come to his summons. It may be clear to these ancients, if not to the King himself, that whatever avatar possessed the little necromancer had also become corrupt, and sought to seize the power of a god’s hand and word and magic for itself..

Eboric , the only flesh-and-blood body in his army, is the only one that stands at risk from the lashing limbs, but he seems lost in his own world, entranced and a part of the song of his ancestors. Perhaps it is that that protects him, however, for the limbs that come near seem to slide away from him. The crowd of dead has grown now, the ranks swelled by Alimer's ancient warband, wiped out in a frozen battle west of Frostmaw long ago. They, too, join the chant, the alliterating verses now more insistent, prying at the monster, working to force it all to surface.

As the bulk of an iceberg rests unseen below the frigid waters in which it floats, the mass of the Burrower’s bulk could barely be imagined by those viewing the portion which had shattered the land. Yes, it had grown very big since first it was created in Aranoch’s alchemical tanks, but it also, thanks to the god-gifts it had hoarded to itself these many long centuries, grown something of its own mind, rude and raw, hardly fit to be called a mind, yet knowing and greedy all the same… It was no longer a vacuous servant, this overgrown abomination, no longer merely a vile watchdog waiting for the command of a master who’d been flung from the planet like the disgrace he was, the command which subsequently never came. Until now.. and the Burrower wasn’t listening. Whether by its own dim will or due to the skilful barrow-phantoms and their fervent wyrding, the creature erupted indeed, half of it now slurping out of a vast hole in the ground, pushing mounds upon mounds of soured dirt, tons of it, aside. But where it had flailed and grasped at Eboric’s ghosts, it now slashed its longest limb at Tenebrae, where she hung in the air – for yet another wholly inappropriate analogy, like an unthinkable child of some abstract monstrous mother, trying to catch and escaped balloon. Meanwhile, Tenebrae chanted on, the avatar seeking only to control the Burrower. The Child of Aranoch, the Burrower of legend, sought to draw the avatar into itself – what a god-thing it would make, if it once more had both the Eyes in its grasp, now it was awoken! So a second battle commenced, the tentacled mass torn between tasks, only more enraged for the confusion this division of its limited attention caused.

Eboric does not seem to even notice the vast wound left in the ground. Instead, he spurs his ghostly horse closer to the monster, its attention now distracted by Tenebrae. With him advances his army, transparent weapons at the ready. The three riders in front seem to recognize the beast's goal, the Eyes known, at least, to Ine. Swiftly, a detachment of spectral figures form up behind the three, forming a wedge. Much as they might have in life, the swine-array charges forward, aiming itself at the mass of flesh where the scepter was last seen, an attack that, hopefully, takes the distracted fiend by surprise, robbing it of the supernatural power of the scepter.

Whereas before the avatar had entirely discounted the werebear as insignificant to its goals – seizing both sceptre and the monster which grasped it – that bizarre company of warriors was now sharply in focus. The Burrower itself, simple-minded and driven only by the basest sort of greed, turned its debased intelligence mainly to the task of grappling Tenebrae from her levitating heights so it could gring her up in its many maws and swallow the precious artefact she bore. Blow after blow was levelled at the necromancer, most falling short, one or two merely battering at her feet and legs when they were within reach. The thing –in- that body howled in ire, for it presumed the King of Venturil and the ancient enemies with him sought to wrest Eyes away themselves, and every moment devoted to preventing that was time it could not spend and attention it could not spare, in its failing bid to keep Tenebrae’s flesh away from the protean wretch below, as well as attempting the leash the monster to its own will.. This three-way clash continued, amid the wreckage of the eastern portion of the Causeway and several miles of surrounding land, only for a time until Eboric’s ancestors made their move, and by the distraction caused allowing one of those black and suckered snake-like limbs to lashTenebrae from the air. She fell! And hard, into mushy, broken soil, like a sack of rocks. Perhaps the avatar was stunned by the Burrower’s success, but for this moment – which promises to be a very short one – there’s a chance for Eboric and his wraiths to turn the odds in their own favour. For there, amid the rubble of their nation, was the very bait which might draw the Burrower not only from its tunnels, like a cancer uprooting itself and crawling free from its host - but perhaps, if they were first to reach the fallen necromancer, they could tempt it out of the country altogether, and make the whole mess somebody’s else’s problem..

Eboric spurs forward, his horse bounding over the broken ground as, driven on by the song of his people, he makes a run for the necromancer. Shifting his weight to the side, the werebear leans over and down, stretching his hand out in an attempt to grab the woman even as he races by, intent on using his huge strength to bear her up to rest on the horse's back, where he can keep her safe as he gallops madly eastward, toward the mountains.

Tenebrae, limp a as a ragdoll, bleeding from one ear and a the terrible head wound that has rendered her unconscious .. and useless to the avatar for now.. was Eboric’s unwitting passenger for that terrible, desperate ride. For generations to come, this will be sung about in taverns from safe, hearthside chairs – for ripping itself loose of its moorings to follow behind the King was the eater-of-nations, a writhing, palsied mountain of protoflesh, on its unfathomable number of limbs and spines and pincers. On came the Burrower, its vast size lending it speed, and all the ancients of Eboric’s venerable line fighting it every inch of the way, to keep the fruit of their lineage from harm.