Chapter Zero: And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Sylvea's erstwhile thrall reared back with both fists raised, readied to land a deciding blow.  But the effort was not entirely warranted.

A command word, blurted in the Elven tongue, was punctuated with the screeching peal of more arcane power snapping into being and darting haphazardly through the bitter air, crashing into their passive target with a rapid tempo.  The cackling corpse pitched forward onto the mildew-streaked cobblestones, and the morbid laughter ebbed from the zombie's unliving tongue as her every muscle slackened with finality.

With the action abating, Sylvea had a spare moment to look further into her surroundings.  Rising over the floor ahead, two thick gears sculpted from tarnished brass continued in the metallic murmurs of their driving and turning, one against the other, their torsion fueled by the drifting, sludge-thickened water below and rising higher on a single steely shaft into the vaulted darkness not far beneath Palemare's streets and wearied houses.  The crumbling platform of cobbled stone — the platform on which gears turned and Sylvea warily stood — grew narrow and more stable, pinched among four supporting pillars of carved stone.  There, the stone rose as masoned stairs the height of a wagon's wheel, terminating beneath the flickering threshold beneath paired doors of pitted bronze.  To one side of those stairs sputtered a tall vase of blue-glazed clay, grown warm with its bellyful of rosemary-scented oil and the orange flame which danced over its skyward-yawning maw; to the other, seated on the floor and limply settled against the looming masonry, another hapless soul lay clad in iron-studded cowhide stained with the blood and humours which had dribbled from her crushed lips and cracked teeth not long past.  In the wagging firelight, many metallic glints scattered unto the rough floor around seemed to caper and cast drifting pinpricks of light across the fallen woman's leather, wool and skin, perhaps serving as another hint to her end.

And beyond those doors, a sharp fit of crazed, throaty laughter rose and fell, yielding to the returning incantation at hand.  "Shal aven mubullat, kulknet riuke!  Come forth and make ready, for soon shall call the cry!  Shal aven mubullat...."

And with his task at an end, the restless corpse enthralled to Sylvea tittered lowly, fixing a lifeless eye on her and lending her nothing less than full attention.  This lackey would not be shackled to the priestess' will forever; best it would be to make use of the zombie while Sylvea could.




Sylvea >

Ok Ainsley - get off your butt!! ME WANT ATTACKY ATTAKY

Yeah, you're right.  I need to finish unpacking and getting my drafting table — and the rest of my artsy corner — back up in working order again.  I still have a lot to unpack here at the new house.



I'll see what I can do tonight and tomorrow, though.  Sorry to keep you waiting, Wraith!

(And did you get any spam messages from some random Guest(s)?  I popped in a few times to deal with the spammers here and there, but I couldn't stay for long.    )

Yeah, I got those messages. I'm looking at cleaning up the forum too :-)

Spoiler:

 Archvillain — Bavatur the Plague-Mad
  — Zombies
— Armored Zombie
 — Ghoul (Currently Bound)
— Sylvea Aringerille





The weighty, brass-bound doors reluctantly yielded to the dead warrior's tugging with the grumble of grinding corrosion at the hinges, slowly swaying outward and bathing the room beyond in a wan and wavering light.  Many slouching and listless figures sluggishly turned and plodded heavily forth, drawn to the radiance without which rippled around the two intruding figures, casting Sylvea and her erstwhile lackey in bodily haloes as they marched forward to greet what confrontation surely awaited them.

And in that moment, the chanting died, its hoarse voice repurposed into an impatient command with a wet, disgruntled sputter.  "...a host of bothers.  Hold!  Hold, ye fools!"

Every zombie in the chamber, save for the errant priestess' thrall, promptly ceased its lurching and shambling.  The stricken voice, then reduced to an annoyed grumbling, led Sylvea's keen eyes through the undead throng and the dim, smoky haze rising to the vaulted ceiling, fixing on a crooked figure who leaned over the supine and lifeless commoner woman laid on the chirurgeon's table before him.  Though clearly cognizant and acting of his own volition, the gaunt and pox-riddled man seemed only marginally more living and hale than the undead throng which milled around him and Sylvea alike.  Another wet grumble pealed from the core of that man, half-garbed in torn, befouled rags and thrusting a spherical gemstone of sheened black through the corpse's lips and into her maw; satisfied, he pressed the dead woman's jaw closed with his wasting hand, a hand blistered with the same yellowed pustules which bulged from every measure of his pallid skin.

Sylvea knew well the task of seeding corpses with black onyxes, preparing such bodies for reanimation into underlings from among the lesser ranks of the undead.  And the pouch beside him on the table — a laden pouch from which had spilled three more such stones and which surely kept many more — suggested that his work remained far from finished by the time she had entered.

"...ehhhhhh heh heh.  Your coming, wee elfling, was known...known, yet sudden and soon...soon...sooner than expected," the pox-wracked man spoke.  "Come to...ehh heh heh...join me...serve me in my ambiance...ambition of revenge, have ye?  Heh...surely not.  Mine eyes...eye reaches far, far through these hollows, and sounds can peal...eh heh heh...for miles through these wet stones!  You met with some of the...residue...resident shriekers, I gathered."

Shifting in his stance and turning his face further aside, he twitched on reaching rightward for something beneath the table and beyond himself.  Although the room and its surrounding sewer were temperately cool, the curious splitting and shattering of icicles cracked from somewhere beneath the table, followed with the faint wisps of a hoarfrost mist spreading past his unsteady ankles and across the flagstone floor.  In that moment, his stance relaxed like that of a vulture freshly satiated, and he twisted sharply at the waist and snapped his head about to regard his elven visitor with his remaining jaundiced eye, its mate obliterated by the blosssoming tumors which had consumed the sinister side of his face.

"Eh heh...heh...heh!  But where are my...oh, what's the word?  Ah...manners, aye!  I am Bavatur, by name...Bavatur, Wizard of Palemare...or cast out of Palemare, rather!  'Plague-Mad,' they called me, and many more stinging...eh...epith...epoch...bah!  Names!"

The last word parted from his fevered lips with a spat report.  With a fleeting pause to collect himself, he resumed.  "Now, you have eh heh heh surely witnessed my handiness...handiwork on your journey here through and below this blighted Palemare, aye?  The Laughing Death, they named it, and aptly so.  That is...become my life's work.  That is me.  So what of you, milady?  Who may you be, and why have you...egh...heh heh...eiggghhhkh!!!"

The nigh-skeletal frame of Bavatur the Plague-Mad twisted violently against the chirurgeon table as the sudden, agonized scream gripped him, his yellow saliva dribbling to the floor while he exhaled in release, collecting his diminished wits again.  His ear-ringing outburst, loud and abrupt enough to give even his gibbering zombies pause, was followed with a wake of near-silence, a silence eroded by the crackling oil-flames dancing in the green-tarnished braziers, the ever-present coursing of the river below, heavy gouts of thick, dark ichor falling and dashing into the clay amphora collecting them below and the monstrously large and malformed heart suspended in chains at the far corner of the chamber, a monstrous and blood-weeping heart cast in a dozen pinpricks of candlelight set around its magic circle scrawled in scarlet clay and charcoal across the stony floor, ensorcelled through the Dark Arts and spitting that ichor forth from its broad, dangling and sundered veins as it continued to beat as rhythmically as it did when it was freshly carved from a nameless giant's breast.  And not much closer to the two from that heart, a single ghoul, restrained to his own crude surgeon's table by leather and by steel, strained against the bonds, snapping and snarling in the maddening throes of the advanced Ghoul Hunger which Sylvea Aringerille, Priestess of Evening Glory, Priestess of Love beyond Death, Priestess Errant of the Temple Pax ex Quietus and She Who Walks with Ghouls knew well.

Listlessly, Bavatur returned to a straighter posture, hesitating to speak again.  "...eh heh heh...well, madam?"


Sylvea >

Sylvea stepped into the madman's domain, ready for anything. Save what she found.

No-one rushed to attack her and her undead companion, in fact despite the obvious, Bavatur was being rather congenial. She blinked, taking her time to take in the entire scene before she answered, choosing her words carefully.

"I am Sylvea Aringerille, Priestess of Evening Glory." Her voice was calm, collected and even. Authority rang clear in her words, "I would ask, Bavatur, what is your purpose with this plague? What do you wish to achieve?"

She began to move to the side: placing a solid wall at her back, her undead minion shuffling along with her.

Glazed in the wavering firelight, the blighted madman's eye followed Sylvea in her pacing around the old workmens' chamber, his gaze darkening and boring into her as he took her introduction.

"PFAH!!!  Priests like you!  Self-indulgent, self-righteous and endlessly pontifical fools, eh heh heh...possessed of far too tight a grasp on the ignite...ignorant masses!  They are, in no small part, why I do this!  They, who see pestilence as a foe to be bested, not as a fenest...phenomenon to be examined, picked apart and...eh heh heh heh...catalogued for the good of future gent...generations!"

Aimlessly muttering under his breath, Bavatur limped around the chirurgeon table, followed by a resonant wooden scratching and the wisps of hoarfrost circling his legs, his pocked and blistered hand dragged over the contours of his deceased subject as if to punctuate his point.  As he paced around to the dead woman's feet, the source of the thin, frosted mist came into view: a long bludgeon of fair ashwood dragged in his limp hand, its brunt expertly carved and thrice-banded in thick brass, its wood glistening with a sheen of ice and leaving fleeting flecks of frost wherever it kissed the floor.  That he would keep such a weapon crafted with distinctly potent wizardry close at hand spoke much of his paranoid state: had he always been expecting hostile visitors, or did he not wholly trust his own reanimated lackeys?

But for now, in his winding and plague-marred thoughts, this makeshift charnel house was his shrine, Sylvea was his parish and he had his own sermon to deliver.  "I persisted in my work, work which Palemare's temples of Ilmater and Heironeous deemed...abominable.  Abominable!  Feh...heh heh...but I persisted indeed, learning scourges and learning their symptoms, bottling the biles extort...extracted from the afflicted, even striving to create new diseases, that we might know how and whence pestilence comes.  And if these...heh...heh heh...aloof priests and healers would not aid me in my valiant heh heh research, then I would go forth alone."

He turned again to meet Sylvea's gaze with a bitter glare, leaving the large, throbbing heart suspended across the chamber to rhythmically fill the spot of silence.

"And then they cast me out.  Drove me from my home here in Palemare!  These damnable priests...ehhhh heh heh...they gathered their faithful rabble like huntsmen calling to their hounds and they drove me out with torches and with spears!  They led my neighbors from their hovels and their cottages, and...eh heh heh...then they set my home ablaze!  My home of many years...decades, burned to the pavestones, and all of my resurg...research, my notes, my journals and my books, my samples...my home burned and all of my works burned with it!  Such I saw ere the priests, the peasants, the Watch's men-at-arms...ere all of their lot drove me beyond Palemare's walls and forf...forbade me to return on pain of death."


But quite obviously, Bavatur's work with pestilence did not end in the blazes with that past home; he may have even brought the fruits of his work with him, for Sylvea had taken note of Bavatur's appearance, his gait, his afflicted manner of speech and even the coursing of his breaths to assess that he himself was then wracked with no fewer than three grievous diseases.  Swamp Pox.  Mindfire.  And he too was beginning to show the symptoms of the Laughing Death, quite likely having fallen prey to his own devices.  And equally likely it was that he was beset with more scourges than these, but such were beyond the Hand of Evening Glory's perceptions and expertise.

But she knew enough about these few plagues to realize that, by every right, Bavatur should already be slowly expiring in his befouled bed, if not already dead.  So through what providence did he continue to stand, to speak and to walk about?  She was not long in perceiving the answer hinted in the listing, shambling figures stood all around her, for pestilence is but one estate subject to the fell arts of Necromancy.

The wizard's voice sputtered into being again.  "So do the reasons behind my ambiva...ambitions for revenge against the folk of Palemare become any more clear, Priestess Aringerille?"


Sylvea >

"What you are doing cannot be construed as anything but madness. You are afflicted by your own disease, and possibly more. Yet you still stand here."

She looks around, she is far outnumbered and should it come to a fight, she was sure she would not be on the victors side.

She sighed, "But, I believe that your intentions were good when you started, as most often than not, intentions start fairly purely. She reflected a moment, thinking of her now undead sister.

"This is a corruption, a perversion of the sanctity of life. And of the sacredness of Death."

Keeping her back to the wall, she raised her Wand and cast out its magic towards the beating heart.

Bavatur's one-eyed leer collapses into an indignant frown as his elven visitor calls out against his madness, then speculates all too keenly that his intentions and his works, once good yet misguided, have grown bitter and excessively vengeful to the point of maleficence.  Though his fevered lips part to speak and to retort against Sylvea's condemnation, his words die on his lips, replaced only with more empty cackling — the voice of the Laughing Death.

But her quest beckons, and with the sands of time flowing against her, Sylvea brings a sudden end to the parley.  Promptly drawing the copper wand from her belt once more, the arcane outburst of command is spat from her convicted tongue, and the now-familiar screeches of three racing orbs of wizard-fire peal off the chamber's every flagstone wall.  As unerringly as ever, the Magic Missiles wind and weave swiftly along their warping trajectories, bursting against — and into — the bloated cardiac muscles of the animate heart, ever pulsing against its iron chains.  And if there had been even the slightest kindred spirit betwixt both Sylvea and Bavatur, it is interred beneath a cascade of shock, vindictiveness and castigation in this very moment.



"Fools!  Fools!!!" howls the pox-wracked necromancer in a fit of affronted dismay, his frantic eye darting swiftly among his lifeless throng.  "Halt your idling!  Strike her down!  Tear the god-witch to pieces!  She must not destroy the Heart of the Laughing Death!  Ehhh heh heh heh...kill her now!"



• A number of details in this encounter and its setting suggest that Bavatur the Plague-Mad is a wizard of considerable power (and of a notably higher Level than Sylvea), including the number of zombies at his command, the crude library and its collection of magical items and trappings, the alembics and retorts indicative of a practiced alchemist or other brewer of potions, and the large, throbbing, monstrous Heart of the Laughing Death dangling over an arcane circle and dripping its foul ichor into an amphora; surely this Heart can only be a powerful necromantic relic of some sort, and a wizard possessed of such mystic might could likely overpower Sylvea quite easily.  However...

• Given Bavatur's evident derangement and his manner of speech, the pestilences with which he has been beset have wracked not only his body but his mind as well.  As clerics and other proficient healers know, diseases are slow to fester and slow to harm compared to poisons, yet the damage which diseases convey can be far more profound; if left untreated, certain diseases can cause permanent losses to one's Attributes — the exact Attributes diminished dependent on the disease contracted — with some even harrowing Charisma, Wisdom and, indeed, the Intelligence on which wizards overwhelmingly depend in their mastery of magic, the numbers of spells which they can prepare and cast, and the magnitudes of such woven spells.

• With madness also come certain vulnerabilities, and the more profound the madness, the greater its liabilities.  Could Bavatur's derangements — including his all-consuming need to watch the whole of Palemare fall to deathly silence before he himself succumbs and perishes to his own devices — present any frailties for Sylvea to exploit to his detriment?

• Though Bavatur was warned of her party's intrusion into Palemare's sewers, Sylvea's accidental shortcut through the river has denied Bavatur enough time to seed all fifteen of his gathered corpses with black onyxes.  This has greatly reduced the number of corpses which he can reanimate into zombies and call to his aid in an emergency, should the confrontation with Sylvea turn against him.

• Fortunately for Sylvea, zombies cannot run and she can outpace them easily enough...for a time.  But these undead, despite their many shortcomings, are tireless and relentless in their pursuits, and there are many of them such a room of finite size.  Whether Sylvea tires from the chase or becomes cornered by their weight of numbers, she almost certainly cannot flee and elude them forever.

•  Through her own dabbling forays into the Arts Arcane, Sylvea can safely deduce that even if Bavatur is not a dedicated necromancer, his employment of poisons, pestilences and the undead in his schemes mark him as a mage well-versed in the arts of necromancy nonetheless.  But clerics, direct envoys and servants of the gods — gods without whom the very state of undeath may never have come to be in the first place — that they are, can exert influence and control over the undead that all but the most veteran mages could only hope to match, let alone surmount.

• Judging by the wet hissing which swells and ebbs with the dancing flames — aural reports grown familiar during Sylvea's many years of replenishing and lighting the sconces and braziers in her temple's cemetery and crypts — the three standing braziers illuminating this room in warm, wavering firelight seem to be fueled by small piles of gathered wood steeping in their basins of thick lamp oil, infused with such pungent and cloying incenses as sandalwood and frankincense to mask the nauseating reek from the withering corpses, all of which promise that the radiant flames will burn hot for quite some time.




Bavatur the Plague-Mad (Init 15) - Casting an unknown spell at Sylvea.
Sylvea's Zombie (Init 9) - Standing fast and defending Sylvea (unless commanded otherwise)
Sylvea (Init 7) -
Zombies 1, 2, 5, 6 and 10 (Init 1) - Moving to engage Sylvea in melee
Zombies 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 11 and 12 (Init 1) - Moving to engage Sylvea's Zombie in melee.


Sylvea >