Post by zdarkshadowz on Jun 12, 2012 1:02:15 GMT -5
The storm raged on amidst a raging sea. Lightning crackled in the sky, as an armoured man stood at the bow of a merchant's trading ship bound for Waterdeep, as it crashed repeatedly through wave after wave. The ancient ship, wrought of teak, oak and mahogany groaned under the elements. The captain, an indistinct blur amidst the rain and darkness, battled with the storm for control of the ship in an eternal struggle, as he barked orders to his scurrying bilge rats despite the protests of the winds. The armoured mans gaze stared outward into the storm, and beyond, his hands tightening about the railing as he closed his eyes briefly, wondering how it all came to this...
Another day outside the town of Tilverton, a young, naive peasant boy played with an equally naive farmer's girl within a large cornfield almost ready for the reaping. The sun sparkled in the clear autumn sky, as the two drew close, smiling, completely oblivious to their surroundings and were about to kiss... before the girl was pulled away and the boy met the back of a metal gauntlet.
"This girl is hereby reserved for the son of honourable Lord Trantenor." issued a gutteral voice, the boy staring up through blood and tears to see his childhood friend being dragged away by the local militia. A metal boot met him this time, and he briefly flew, halted by his back smacking harshly at the thick stalks of maize, and he fell unconscious.
Hours later he dredged his way back into town, his clothes filthy, his face still caked with blood. He walked down a merchants lane, vendors eyeing him with distaste, as if he was yet another beggar child on the street looking for pity. His wooden shod shoes clicked across the ground in a limping fashion, until his eyes rose up to meet the guarded fortress of a nobles mansion. The guards at the gate eyed him skeptically, and as the boy walked up, silent, to the gates to ask if he could see her, the butt of a spear met his chest, sending him sprawling back onto the dirt-laden road. An oddly flamboyantly dressed girl burst out of the mansion, as the nobles within followed suit, catching her quickly.
"Rhia, your father sold you to us, you're our property now. If you don't want your father to face an unfortunate end, then you had best get back inside..." They then promptly dragged her kicking and screaming back into the house... "I'd do anything for you to all rot!" she spat, before she was dragged within doors of the mansion, closing and consuming her once more.
An exceptionally sudden vibration broke the armoured man out of his reverie and he glanced backwards, to see the mast of the ship snapping in two, flattening a few of the captains crew with multiple sickening crunching sounds. Cursing to himself, he turned back around and stared into the storm once more as his gauntleted hands clenched tighter on the railing, his dark blue eyes boring into the obscured horizon as if trying to will the storm into something more solid that he could lay his blade into.
"This is what I get for taking the late boat..." He mutters to himself, closing his eyes once more and letting the rain sooth his rage at yet another battle he could not win...
A few years later in Tilverton, and the mansion stood before him once more. The boy had already gone through puberty, and he was a young man now, his jet black hair and dark blue eyes eyeing the rusted gates as peasants nearby quickly walked past in fear of the place. The walls had crumbled, the guards left and the nobles had mysteriously disappeared one by one. The place was a ruin, and haunted, the locals were always quick to add, yet it was still mostly intact, the sheer size of the place still obscuring one end of the street to the other. Investigations had ceased almost as soon as they had started, as no one walking inside ever returned...
The young man rested his well-worn hands to his side, grasping the hilt of a sword he had made himself when he had taken up work as an apprentice blacksmith to try buy his friend back, to no avail. The blade was notched, and warped back slightly in a curve, but the weight was comfortable, the edge sharp and the steel strong.
If she isn't here, perhaps I can find some clue as to what happened... He thought to himself, as he strode into the derelict, decaying bones that once housed... her. Wing after wing he went through the house, a dark, ominous feeling echoing from the walls, until finally he opened a door, and there she was, lying in a rather revealing dress upon a luxurious bed, within a large bedroom decorated with extravagance too numerous to detail... and oddly unable to detail, the scenery swimming before his vision, but his gaze was focused on the woman, his jaw dropped and he got down on one knee, the sword falling to the ground as his carefully prepared speech broke into pieces, words flying from his mouth.
"What happened here?"
"Are you alright?"
"Do you remember me?"
"I came to try find you..."
She spoke but one word, laying a hand upon his brow, and he felt giddy, dazed, helpless as the woman undressed them both and ravished him for hours until he fell unconscious, drained...
His eyes opened to meet a ceiling, crumbling paint and plaster falling from the ceiling, and the wretched stench of death. He gazed about the decrepit room, coughing at the dust arising from the bed he lay in. Silver, gold, jewellery and various other pieces of treasure lay strewn about the room, but this didn't catch his eye. Nor was it the apparent absolute destruction of the room overnight, nor the numerous mutilated corpses in various states of decay that lay piled about the room. It was more the unclothed succubus that lay on her front at the end of the bed, propping herself up with an elbow as a forked tongue licked the insides out of a long-dead Lord Trantenor's head held before her, popping the rotting eyeballs of its sockets deftly into her mouth as it eyed the young man lustfully with purple, pupiless eyes, large bat-like wings erected over her like a thick, reddish leathery cloak.
"Oh, did I wake you?" She said seductively, marred by a squelching sound shortly afterwards as she squished the last eye within her mouth and swallowed.
"Did you want some breakfast?" The succubus said, offering the head towards the horrified young man. After a few moments of silence, the succubus tossed the head onto one of the piles of corpses and clicked her fingers, bringing forth her illusion of the young woman once more, stark naked. The woman stared at him once more, flashing her pretty green eyes before reverting them back into their pupiless forms, and then her entirety back into her succubus form once more. As if she was reading his mind, she continued;
"I suppose I owe you an explanation, my 'love'. You see, when this girl was taken, she was oh so sad, so very sad... I came to her in her dreams, and offered her a way out, if she would give me a way in... and so, from the inside out, I turned her into, well... me. I can hear her screaming to you, trying to tell you to run but, alas... your time is up, and I've had my fun. It's time for me to move onto bigger and better things."
The man rolled off the bed clumsily, grasping at his sword that lay near the bed, and holding it out in front of him.
"You fool, do you really think you can harm me with that?" She mocked. "Come on then, try it."
The man rushed forward, striking to drive the blade through her heart, but her skin repelled the steel easily, his arm jarring to the side as the succubus wrapped her arms around him lovingly, dragging him down and wrapping her legs around his lower back.
"One, 'final' embrace then, my 'love'?" the demon asked seductively in his former friends voice, her warped, forked tongue licking his lips before she laid a kiss upon him, draining his energy from him once more. The man lashed his blade outwards, blindly, happening to collide with a nearby tarnished, silver candlebra, and tried stabbing the succubus once more. This time, the blade sunk through, the stray silver coating parting the demons flesh like butter, deep into her side and the hot warmth of her blood flowed over his sword-hand.
The succubus choked, blood spraying from her mouth, as her body began to viciously turn back into the frail form of his former childhood friend, the clawed hands turning humanoid once more, the wings receeding into her back until it was a flawless smooth, pale pink. Her eyes rolled about aimlessly briefly, turning normal once more, and he cradled the woman in his arms as she whispered through her dying breath, her eyes focusing briefly for but a moment upon her saviour... "Sol..." before all was silent, except for the heartwrenching moans of a broken man...
...and thats how the local militia found him, as the dark aura the people felt about the mansion fell away and they finally had the courage to investigate. A naked man holding the former wife of Lord Trantenor's son, his handwrought blade deep in her side, the pool of fresh dark red blood surrounding them both and the corpses of the nobles surrounding in their unspeakable carnage. He was promptly clapped in irons and led far outside of the town of Tilverton, a black hood lumped over his head, escorted into a shack in the middle of the woods, and he was left there to await his execution in the morning, out of the attentions of the slowly rising and rioting mob in the streets trying to come to terms with the events, and explaining their numerously warping variations. The possessor succubus had done her job, she would awake within a week from her comatose state, her real body secured in Lord Tranetor's crypt behind the mansion, and then she would send out her astral form to possess someone else. The district turned against each other in the chaos that ensued... but no one would ever hear of these twisted, isolated events. The date had been Mirtul 26th, 1372 DR, and the forces of Thultanthar destroyed the town effortlessly.
The armoured man gazed outwards into the storm once more, and with each bolt that arced across the sky, the rest of his life coming in quick flashes... the escape from the abandoned shack after waiting two days and nights alone in remorse for his judgement, finding his warped blade and cutting free his bonds.... his journey to a temple of Torm, where he pledged himself to their cause, after intensive testing of his heart's worth.
His memory skipped forward a few more years. His comrades, brief and perhaps on those distant docks already, were on a quest to Waterdeep, to the bar that held the entrance to the Undermountain where they were to hunt down any evil they could that lay in Halaster the Mad's forever-twisted maze. A brief excursion with the bandits before they could reach that destination had separated him from his horse, and had forced him to trek to Waterdeep alone, while the other followers of Torm subdued the bandits and rode on ahead. "Time is of the essence in our quest", they had said to him, and thus the man took the time to adequately bury his horse, Rhia, before walking on.
He continued to the nearest port town, being haggled out of his last few ounces of coin for the last boat to Waterdeep for a while... or so the dockworkers had told him. Despite the convenient inconvenience, he let it be. They were entitled to charge their own prices after all...
So the armoured man blinked the rain from his visage as he looked across the tempest that lay before him once more, as the ship came crashing into the harbour of Kalaram, the lighthouse long-since extinguished had made the island fairly unnoticeable. The armoured man was deftly hurled out suddenly over the railing onto the rooftops of the nearby houses, misplacing the tiles from the roofs in several directions as he ground harshly to a halt.
Dazed, his arm dislocated, he stood up wearily, reaching a hand up to ruffle his hair briefly before crunching his plated shoulder back into place. He gazed with a spinning vision out from the rooftops to what was left of the crew, as they started securing the boat to the docks with ropes so the remains wouldn't drift back out to sea, and he watched silently nursing his wounds as they went to look for the dockworkers to sort things out with the local authorities. The captain strode up to one likely looking man ambling about aimlessly in rather dirty clothes, tapping him on the shoulder and barking something about charging the authorities for repairs and recompense, due to the lighthouse not being turned on, when he promptly screamed out in pain and withdrew a bleeding stump, as the undeathly creature caressed and chewed lovingly on the five-finger discount.
The aftermath with the rest of the crew, needless to say, was not pretty, as the undead drawn to the cries swarmed around them all, the only mercy being it was over in a matter of seconds. The man couldn't get to his supplies, stowed upon an unsecured, sinking ship, nor was he in any fit shape to battle those abhorrent creatures, so he rolled unceremoniously off the rooftops into a pile of trash, and dashed off west, deep into the night... until he stumbled through a strong, but unlocked door to a moderately boarded up, two-story house with a blazing, warm fireplace. He laid down by the fire, catching his breath and closed his eyes once more...
Another day outside the town of Tilverton, a young, naive peasant boy played with an equally naive farmer's girl within a large cornfield almost ready for the reaping. The sun sparkled in the clear autumn sky, as the two drew close, smiling, completely oblivious to their surroundings and were about to kiss... before the girl was pulled away and the boy met the back of a metal gauntlet.
"This girl is hereby reserved for the son of honourable Lord Trantenor." issued a gutteral voice, the boy staring up through blood and tears to see his childhood friend being dragged away by the local militia. A metal boot met him this time, and he briefly flew, halted by his back smacking harshly at the thick stalks of maize, and he fell unconscious.
Hours later he dredged his way back into town, his clothes filthy, his face still caked with blood. He walked down a merchants lane, vendors eyeing him with distaste, as if he was yet another beggar child on the street looking for pity. His wooden shod shoes clicked across the ground in a limping fashion, until his eyes rose up to meet the guarded fortress of a nobles mansion. The guards at the gate eyed him skeptically, and as the boy walked up, silent, to the gates to ask if he could see her, the butt of a spear met his chest, sending him sprawling back onto the dirt-laden road. An oddly flamboyantly dressed girl burst out of the mansion, as the nobles within followed suit, catching her quickly.
"Rhia, your father sold you to us, you're our property now. If you don't want your father to face an unfortunate end, then you had best get back inside..." They then promptly dragged her kicking and screaming back into the house... "I'd do anything for you to all rot!" she spat, before she was dragged within doors of the mansion, closing and consuming her once more.
An exceptionally sudden vibration broke the armoured man out of his reverie and he glanced backwards, to see the mast of the ship snapping in two, flattening a few of the captains crew with multiple sickening crunching sounds. Cursing to himself, he turned back around and stared into the storm once more as his gauntleted hands clenched tighter on the railing, his dark blue eyes boring into the obscured horizon as if trying to will the storm into something more solid that he could lay his blade into.
"This is what I get for taking the late boat..." He mutters to himself, closing his eyes once more and letting the rain sooth his rage at yet another battle he could not win...
A few years later in Tilverton, and the mansion stood before him once more. The boy had already gone through puberty, and he was a young man now, his jet black hair and dark blue eyes eyeing the rusted gates as peasants nearby quickly walked past in fear of the place. The walls had crumbled, the guards left and the nobles had mysteriously disappeared one by one. The place was a ruin, and haunted, the locals were always quick to add, yet it was still mostly intact, the sheer size of the place still obscuring one end of the street to the other. Investigations had ceased almost as soon as they had started, as no one walking inside ever returned...
The young man rested his well-worn hands to his side, grasping the hilt of a sword he had made himself when he had taken up work as an apprentice blacksmith to try buy his friend back, to no avail. The blade was notched, and warped back slightly in a curve, but the weight was comfortable, the edge sharp and the steel strong.
If she isn't here, perhaps I can find some clue as to what happened... He thought to himself, as he strode into the derelict, decaying bones that once housed... her. Wing after wing he went through the house, a dark, ominous feeling echoing from the walls, until finally he opened a door, and there she was, lying in a rather revealing dress upon a luxurious bed, within a large bedroom decorated with extravagance too numerous to detail... and oddly unable to detail, the scenery swimming before his vision, but his gaze was focused on the woman, his jaw dropped and he got down on one knee, the sword falling to the ground as his carefully prepared speech broke into pieces, words flying from his mouth.
"What happened here?"
"Are you alright?"
"Do you remember me?"
"I came to try find you..."
She spoke but one word, laying a hand upon his brow, and he felt giddy, dazed, helpless as the woman undressed them both and ravished him for hours until he fell unconscious, drained...
His eyes opened to meet a ceiling, crumbling paint and plaster falling from the ceiling, and the wretched stench of death. He gazed about the decrepit room, coughing at the dust arising from the bed he lay in. Silver, gold, jewellery and various other pieces of treasure lay strewn about the room, but this didn't catch his eye. Nor was it the apparent absolute destruction of the room overnight, nor the numerous mutilated corpses in various states of decay that lay piled about the room. It was more the unclothed succubus that lay on her front at the end of the bed, propping herself up with an elbow as a forked tongue licked the insides out of a long-dead Lord Trantenor's head held before her, popping the rotting eyeballs of its sockets deftly into her mouth as it eyed the young man lustfully with purple, pupiless eyes, large bat-like wings erected over her like a thick, reddish leathery cloak.
"Oh, did I wake you?" She said seductively, marred by a squelching sound shortly afterwards as she squished the last eye within her mouth and swallowed.
"Did you want some breakfast?" The succubus said, offering the head towards the horrified young man. After a few moments of silence, the succubus tossed the head onto one of the piles of corpses and clicked her fingers, bringing forth her illusion of the young woman once more, stark naked. The woman stared at him once more, flashing her pretty green eyes before reverting them back into their pupiless forms, and then her entirety back into her succubus form once more. As if she was reading his mind, she continued;
"I suppose I owe you an explanation, my 'love'. You see, when this girl was taken, she was oh so sad, so very sad... I came to her in her dreams, and offered her a way out, if she would give me a way in... and so, from the inside out, I turned her into, well... me. I can hear her screaming to you, trying to tell you to run but, alas... your time is up, and I've had my fun. It's time for me to move onto bigger and better things."
The man rolled off the bed clumsily, grasping at his sword that lay near the bed, and holding it out in front of him.
"You fool, do you really think you can harm me with that?" She mocked. "Come on then, try it."
The man rushed forward, striking to drive the blade through her heart, but her skin repelled the steel easily, his arm jarring to the side as the succubus wrapped her arms around him lovingly, dragging him down and wrapping her legs around his lower back.
"One, 'final' embrace then, my 'love'?" the demon asked seductively in his former friends voice, her warped, forked tongue licking his lips before she laid a kiss upon him, draining his energy from him once more. The man lashed his blade outwards, blindly, happening to collide with a nearby tarnished, silver candlebra, and tried stabbing the succubus once more. This time, the blade sunk through, the stray silver coating parting the demons flesh like butter, deep into her side and the hot warmth of her blood flowed over his sword-hand.
The succubus choked, blood spraying from her mouth, as her body began to viciously turn back into the frail form of his former childhood friend, the clawed hands turning humanoid once more, the wings receeding into her back until it was a flawless smooth, pale pink. Her eyes rolled about aimlessly briefly, turning normal once more, and he cradled the woman in his arms as she whispered through her dying breath, her eyes focusing briefly for but a moment upon her saviour... "Sol..." before all was silent, except for the heartwrenching moans of a broken man...
...and thats how the local militia found him, as the dark aura the people felt about the mansion fell away and they finally had the courage to investigate. A naked man holding the former wife of Lord Trantenor's son, his handwrought blade deep in her side, the pool of fresh dark red blood surrounding them both and the corpses of the nobles surrounding in their unspeakable carnage. He was promptly clapped in irons and led far outside of the town of Tilverton, a black hood lumped over his head, escorted into a shack in the middle of the woods, and he was left there to await his execution in the morning, out of the attentions of the slowly rising and rioting mob in the streets trying to come to terms with the events, and explaining their numerously warping variations. The possessor succubus had done her job, she would awake within a week from her comatose state, her real body secured in Lord Tranetor's crypt behind the mansion, and then she would send out her astral form to possess someone else. The district turned against each other in the chaos that ensued... but no one would ever hear of these twisted, isolated events. The date had been Mirtul 26th, 1372 DR, and the forces of Thultanthar destroyed the town effortlessly.
The armoured man gazed outwards into the storm once more, and with each bolt that arced across the sky, the rest of his life coming in quick flashes... the escape from the abandoned shack after waiting two days and nights alone in remorse for his judgement, finding his warped blade and cutting free his bonds.... his journey to a temple of Torm, where he pledged himself to their cause, after intensive testing of his heart's worth.
His memory skipped forward a few more years. His comrades, brief and perhaps on those distant docks already, were on a quest to Waterdeep, to the bar that held the entrance to the Undermountain where they were to hunt down any evil they could that lay in Halaster the Mad's forever-twisted maze. A brief excursion with the bandits before they could reach that destination had separated him from his horse, and had forced him to trek to Waterdeep alone, while the other followers of Torm subdued the bandits and rode on ahead. "Time is of the essence in our quest", they had said to him, and thus the man took the time to adequately bury his horse, Rhia, before walking on.
He continued to the nearest port town, being haggled out of his last few ounces of coin for the last boat to Waterdeep for a while... or so the dockworkers had told him. Despite the convenient inconvenience, he let it be. They were entitled to charge their own prices after all...
So the armoured man blinked the rain from his visage as he looked across the tempest that lay before him once more, as the ship came crashing into the harbour of Kalaram, the lighthouse long-since extinguished had made the island fairly unnoticeable. The armoured man was deftly hurled out suddenly over the railing onto the rooftops of the nearby houses, misplacing the tiles from the roofs in several directions as he ground harshly to a halt.
Dazed, his arm dislocated, he stood up wearily, reaching a hand up to ruffle his hair briefly before crunching his plated shoulder back into place. He gazed with a spinning vision out from the rooftops to what was left of the crew, as they started securing the boat to the docks with ropes so the remains wouldn't drift back out to sea, and he watched silently nursing his wounds as they went to look for the dockworkers to sort things out with the local authorities. The captain strode up to one likely looking man ambling about aimlessly in rather dirty clothes, tapping him on the shoulder and barking something about charging the authorities for repairs and recompense, due to the lighthouse not being turned on, when he promptly screamed out in pain and withdrew a bleeding stump, as the undeathly creature caressed and chewed lovingly on the five-finger discount.
The aftermath with the rest of the crew, needless to say, was not pretty, as the undead drawn to the cries swarmed around them all, the only mercy being it was over in a matter of seconds. The man couldn't get to his supplies, stowed upon an unsecured, sinking ship, nor was he in any fit shape to battle those abhorrent creatures, so he rolled unceremoniously off the rooftops into a pile of trash, and dashed off west, deep into the night... until he stumbled through a strong, but unlocked door to a moderately boarded up, two-story house with a blazing, warm fireplace. He laid down by the fire, catching his breath and closed his eyes once more...