The Campaign Builder's Guild

I've found myself writing quite a few vignettes or storiettes for my campaign settings, so I thought I'd collect some of them here for persual and/or critique.  When I write more I'll probably post them here as well.

 [ic=Hubris]The sickly sky above Lophius glowered and spat, swollen rainclouds fit to burst, threatening to engulf the disjointed streets with a torrential downpour. The canals were already flooding, the mossy bridges of granite and marble lapped at by the murky waters, the feet of their decorative statues immersed. Out over the Sallow Seas distant thunder cackled, promising a storm. No ships would sail from the docks of Bile-Mire or Chainwater tonight, lest they join the wooden carcasses in the Driftwood District.

The Gland River battered the pillars of the Bridge of Bravoes, swirling about the huge statues supporting the ancient bridge before rushing out to the open sea. In the midst of the worsening downpour two men regarded each other while the crowds behind them jeered and shouted, humans shivering in the rain, hagmen turning their greenish faces upwards, exulting, black-clad ghilan mute and motionless.

'Draw steel, wormfood,' Iccelus sneered. The graftpunk moved with predatory grace, brandishing the glyph-etched rapier Red Laughter and an evil-looking dagger, crooked backwards in his off-hand. He twirled the curved knife and snarled taunts at his opponent. 'Corpse-fucker. Halfman. You should scuttle off to Bad-Fen where you belong, or go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.' There were cheers from the crowd. The young man's black eyes flashed as he walked forwards, blade held out before him, grafted muscles taut beneath tattooed flesh. 'You heard me. Haul your maggoty arse off or I'll send you back to the pit what spawned you.'

The other figure said nothing but favoured the youth with a sharp-toothed and yellowed grin. He removed his tinted spectacles and drew his sword from its scabbard with deliberate slowness, rasping the blade against the tough manskin sheath and assuming a creeping sidelong stance. A broad-brimmed black hat slouched across his features, shading his face and warding off the rain and the hateful sun; drops of water beaded on his brown leather outfit and pattered off the sewn-in steel disks. Behind the pale fighter were more of his ilk '" gray-skinned, dour spectators with mocking amber eyes.

Iccelus' shaved head gleamed wetly. His many earrings jangled as he advanced, drunk with rage and fear. With a wordless howl he hurled his dagger; it spun through the air in a silvery arc, thudded into the living man's adversary. The ghul wrenched it from his chest with a smirk and licked the naked blade clean.

'Thrice-damned unman freak!' Iccelus' face contorted with a paroxysm of raw hate. He danced forward and lunged in a spasm of grafted muscle, his augmented calves writhing. Red Laughter darted out, impossibly fast, bathed in a crimson aura of eldritch energy '" and then spun from its wielder's grasp, knocked aside by the ghul's own blade. It clattered on the flagstones of the bridge and shattered, the demoniac spirit bound within dissipating in a brief ghost of brimstone smoke. Its sigils, previously a blazing red, grew dull.

There was a shimmering blur as the grave-spawn duellist riposted, and Iccelus' shout of frustration turned to a choked gasp. He clawed at the sword now skewering his throat, gurgling; blood dribbled from his mouth. The ghul swordsman chuckled and wrenched his sword from the graftpunk's neck. Iccelus fell to the ground and lay still, the pool of blood spreading beneath him already being washed away by the rain. The crowd's yells died with the youth. They began to back away with suddenly fearful looks.

'Ah, the heady confidence of the young and the living,' the ghul rasped, his voice like snakeskin. He twitched his head and two of his men walked forward, seizing Iccelus' body by the ankles. 'Dinner's on me tonight, boys.'[/ic]

[ic=The Nyx]'We should never '˜ave come '˜ere,' Faud muttered through chattering teeth as he pulled up his hood.  'You've '˜eard the stories, Edwin.  If we're still '˜ere by nightfall'¦'

'Shut up Faud.  We'll be out by sundown, you craven mongrel.'  Edwin peered into the dense mist, one gloved hand lingering at the ornate flintlock at his waist.  Trees rose out of the haze like writhing shades, clawing at the pair with twisted black fingers, draped with old man's beard; some scuttling thing rustled in the forest gloom.

'We'll never find our way out in this fog.  Can't we '˜ave a bit o' light?'

'Those bounty hunters could still be following us.  A light will draw them straight to us.  Do you want to end up like Joff?'

'They won't '˜ave dared come in '˜ere after us!  Can you blame '˜em?  We're done fer if we don't get out of '˜ere sharpish.'

'Damn your superstitions, Faud!' Edwin snapped, stopping in his tracks and turning to face the grizzled highwayman.  Tall and handsome with aristocratic features, Edwin claimed to be the bastard son of a highborn lady.  Currently his breaches and waistcoat were sodden and filthy, his face was flushed and smeared, and his long, usually immaculate hair was matted and damp from the mist.  He looked less like a gentleman robber and more like a mangy thief who'd spent a week sleeping under hedges '" which, in point of fact, he had.  'Excuse me if I'm not resigned to the gallows just yet.  Think of the things we'll buy with that old duchess' jewels '" and with Joff dead we can divide his share.  No more piss-poor ale and pock-faced slatterns for us!  We'll be drinking the finest Tintalaemon burgundy and fucking the plumpest whores in Finchport!'

A far-off glimmer had entered the youth's large brown eyes, but Faud's eyes were wide with fear.  The small, scraggly man stammered something incomprehensible and fumbled for the blade tucked into his belt.

'What are you pissing your breeches for now you bloody fool?'  Edwin frowned, turning back around.  'There's nothing this close to the Edge but a bunch of bloody squirrels you cowardly '"'

The figure had materialized out of the fog without warning.  Slender and elegant with porcelain-white flesh and a lurid grin the creature regarded them with coy predation, head cocked, violet eyes full of mocking laughter.  Long hair blacker than midnight spilled down its back and shoulders, nearly to the forest floor, a pair of antlers emerging from this tenebrous mane; it wore no clothing but carried a long, silvery blade, dripping with crimson.  In the other hand it held up a severed human head which Edwin discerned as belonging to one of the bounty hunters they'd been running from, despite the rictus of terror disfiguring the face.

'Hello, gentlemen,' the thing said with a voice like the sound of a knife being whetted.  'I'm afraid you're both trespassing on my private hunting grounds, for which there is a rather severe penalty.'  It chuckled, held them with its eyes.  For a moment Edwin was hypnotized; then, snarling and breaking free of the violet gaze, he drew his pistol, aimed, and pulled the trigger in one smooth motion, an expression of savage triumph on his face.  

There was a disappointing click.  Edwin looked at the flintlock in horror.  The Faerie twittered gaily, a high, incongruous sound.

  'You mortals and your little toys!  When will you learn?  It's impossible to keep your powder dry in a fog like this!'  It raised one eyebrow and tilted its head to look behind Edwin.  'It looks like your comrade has disappeared,' it noted.  'Ah well!  Two new heads for the trophy wall is better than nothing'¦'

Running through the fog Faud heard from behind him the clean whirr of a blade through the air, followed by a muffled scream.[/ic]

[ic=Vanity]With its chitin-plated, iridescent walls, its nacreous floor, and the cavernous sweep of its ceiling, the great ballroom of magister Pyrach-Quin achieved a glistening resplendence.  Lamps and tallow candles filled the room with a rich green gloom; lush, lively music echoed about the curving organic walls.  The masked guests revolved around the ballroom in languid circles, or else lingered on the balconies outside.

   Belphora sipped her drink and gazed at the crowd, taken aback by the strange spectacle.  Beside the magistras she felt a grey and tawdry thing even in her best finery.  Each had a dress more vivid and luxurious than the last, silk gowns cut in a hundred styles and dyed a  vibrant myriad of colours, blood reds and midnight blues and soft ebon blacks, golds and greens and purples layered with lace and satin, bejeweled with sewn-in opals and pearls and carnelians.  Many had necklines swooping lower than Belphora might have considered seemly, but the magistras wore them without shame, draping themselves with silver and enjoying the effect their naked flesh had on those around them.  The men were equally magnificent in coats of red and black and dark green, with ivory buttons and ringleted curls '" though they inspired self-consciousness rather than jealousy.  And all of them had their familiars, monstrous and sometimes beautiful things somewhere between pets and status symbols '" the homunculi.

   Each was unique, sharing only the sigil-etched collars and silver chains with their brethren, led in elegant configurations around their owners during the dances, taking care not to entangle the dancers with their chains.  A shadowy thing whose limbs blurred when it walked paced about its magister like a well-trained hound; a hulking, muscular creature with a ferret's head and crimson skin stood with its arms crossed beside its owner; an eyeless, gray-skinned demon whose fingernails were knives muttered from a mouth crowded with tusks; a plump imp with bulbous compound eyes and a baby's pudgy limbs fluttered on oversized dragonfly wings by its magistra's shoulder, whining and mewling until it was fed from a tray of sweetmeats.

   'Some more wine, milady?'  The voice was gentle and urbane, but Belphora nearly screamed when she turned to its owner, a tall, flayed figure whose face was a horned skull, holding out a silver pitcher in one skinless hand.  A purple tongue flicked out from between the grinning teeth.  She stuttered the beginning of a reply and the homunculus' magister turned, eyes dark behind his half-mask.

   'Fornus, you are scaring the young lady,' the man said.  'Behave yourself.'  His homunculus bowed demurely and turned away.

   'No, no, it's all right.'  Belphora could feel blood rushing to her face.  'I was just '" startled.'

   'I apologize for my demon.  Some find his appearance alarming.'  The magister was tall and spare, perhaps a bit older than she was, based on the silvering hair at his temples.  'You can call me Sorn.  It's much easier to pronounce than my formal name.'

   'Belphora.  My father is Lord Vlesnk'¦ of the Northern Baronies.'

   'Ah of course.  You speak our tongue well.'  He smiled as her blush deepened, his painted lips curling at the corners.  'Your father '" a liegeman of the Revenants, yes?  Have you seen the Sleepwalker's City?'

   'Once.  It was'¦ quiet.  Not what I expected from a city so large.'

   'Mmm.  I trust you'll find Skein a bit livelier.  Would you care to dance?'

   She nodded shyly, then '" abandoning her drink to Fornus '" took Sorn's arm and let herself be led into the next dance.  The homunculus followed at a distance, a discrete if somewhat macabre shadow.

   The dance was intricate; more than once Belphora nearly stumbled, but Sorn merely smiled and pulled her onwards, ignoring her missteps.

   'You are here with your father's retinue?'  His eyes '" she saw now that they were dark green, rather than black as she'd thought at first '" gleamed in the mask's sockets as he raised his arm to twirl her, placing one gloved hand in the small of her back to help turn her round.

   'N-no'¦ he is conducting business.  In the Saffron Ward, I think.  We were given invitations, but '"'

   'But your father disapproves of this sort of revelry.  You are here without his permission.'  Sorn chuckled and shook his head as she turned again.  'I suppose he thinks us a pack of debauchees, drinking madwine and corrupting innocent young women.'

   She stammered and blushed again; Sorn laughed and pulled her back into position.  'Do not fret, Belphora.  Your secret is safe with me.'

   They crossed the room, turned again, switched positions, crossed back '" and then the music stopped.  The players took up a new tune, dark and heady '" a nocturne.  'Shall we get some air?'  Sorn gestured to an arched doorway where a sultry blue-haired magistra and her many-armed homunculus chatted with a long-haired ghul in the black robes of a sacerdos.  Belphora found herself obeying Sorn without thinking.  Each time their eyes met she felt a strange sensation, a kind of pleasant drowning, as if her fears and anxieties were being washed away, or sucked from her body like bad blood by a leech.  Suddenly she felt as bold as the magistras, shedding her worries like a shawl.  How dare her father forbid her to come?  She would not be treated like a child anymore, would not have to slink away like a thief, guilty and furtive.  When Fornus handed her back her glass she drank deeply.

   The doorway led to a curved balcony; the city spread itself below, glittering in the night, the factory Wards steaming, the gaudily lit pleasure districts alive with tiny milling figures, the occasional spurt of fireworks.  They stood silently and drank in the midnight panorama, listening to the nocturne's velvet melodies.  Out on the black surface of the Radula she could see the lights of distant ships.  Behind the river rose mountains, craggy and sinister.  Belphora shivered.

   'The mountains have an ominous look to them,' she said, wrapping her arms about herself.  Sorn placed a warm hand on her bare shoulder, caressed it almost imperceptibly; Belphora did not seem to notice.

   'The Slouching-devil Mountains are often grim at night.  They are full of monsters '" but you are safe from them here.'

   'They make me uneasy.'

   'You should see the view from my own tower.  It is taller than this one, and faces south '" across the plains.'  He drew back her hair with one strong, white hand, exposing her neck.  Her eyes half closed; she found his voice hypnotic.  Behind the, Fornus stood in the shadows '" Belphora had forgotten him entirely.  Sorn's voice was close to her ear; she could feel his breath on her neck.  'You cannot see the mountains at all.  Would you like that, Belphora?'

   Her eyes were closed, her head tilted; she murmured something, vaguely, and then his lips were on her neck.

Hours later as the night sky began to pale the man who called himself Sorn slipped from his bed and dressed quickly.  He crossed his bedchamber to the large mirror in the corner and inspected himself, brushing out his long, black hair, checking meticulously for the mar of silver.  He squinted at the arched window, where the first rays of sunlight were stealing over the city walls.  Muttering curses he paced over to window to tug at the thick curtains; as he did so his hand was transfixed in a wan shaft of the early morning light.  His eyes flickered momentarily to the gray and age-spotted claw that clutched the curtain; his brow wrinkled with vexation, and then he flung the curtains shut, blocking out the seeping dawn.

   He stopped by the solar on his way to the undercroft to find Fornus gnawing at a lump of bone, its chains piled unceremoniously on the floor.

   'I trust you had a rejuvenating night?'  The demon said, turning its skeletal visage towards him.  'You certainly looked considerably improved.  If you don't mind me saying you were starting to look a bit frayed around the edges.'

   'You'll find what's left of her in my bedchamber,' Sorn replied, ignoring the jibe. 'She's unconscious. An old woman, to look at her, but you'll find her soul palatable enough, I'd wager. Make sure you're thorough. And have the servants clean up afterwards '" she was eager at first but there was some mess towards the end.'

The creature nodded. Its purple tongue flicked out, licking sharp and yellow teeth.[/ic]

[ic=Degeneration]The Ember River was so named for the peculiar transformation which overcame it at gloaming when the sinking sun, filtered through the tattered canopy of the sprawling Tangle, lit the sinuous waters with a scintilla of reds and blues, like the scaled throat of some exotic serpent.  A kind of haunted quality overcame its shimmering length during these twilight hours, lending the river a dappled otherworldliness.  The Ember's mystique was further enhanced by the decaying statues lining its banks: ivy-strangled, weather-stained memories with faces smudged and muddied, once beautiful bodies made grotesque with the mottled depredations of time and encroaching vegetation.  The plaques at their feet proclaimed the names of these faded legends in dead languages, their ancient monikers further obscured by weeds and rushes and clots of turquoise moss.  

At dawn villagers from Hewtown to Thistle would dip their water buckets in the Ember; in the late morning women would wash their families' clothes in its sun-stippled flow; in the afternoon children would play about the statues, or race their carved wooden boats in the darkening currents.  But with the onset of night the children would be ushered hastily from their frolics: the Ember flowed out from the Tangle, its origin doubtless some fey well or enchanted spring, and was widely believed to bewitch any who drank from it or bathed in it after sunset.  Only the first rays of sunrise would dispel the magic.

One tale tells of a weary traveler passing down the Thornroad on his way to the Free House of the Weeping Moon.  A stranger to the Edge, the ignorant traveler (often called 'Haskell', sometimes 'Hugh', and in some rarely heard versions 'Hamfast') was in some hurry to reach the Free House, having an appointment with one of the fair folk (usually identified as the witch Glyness, the Lugh-Shee Lænoch the Lanky, or an unnamed impish trinket-peddler).

Though he failed to reach the Weeping Moon before twilight he refused to make camp, as a he should have done, instead pressing on as the shadows lengthened further and further and finally all was covered in a dewy shroud of fog and darkness.  Wearied by his journey, brow drenched with sweat, flesh clammy from the grasping tendrils of the night's thickening miasma, the traveler stopped briefly by the banks of the Ember River to refresh himself.  Removing his velvet gloves he quickly washed his face and hands with a modest splash of river-water before continuing across Gargoyle Bridge towards his destination.  But as he walked, his cloak drawn close about him to ward off the probing mist, a strange sensation overcame him.

It began at the end of his nose and the tips of his fingers, a prickling strangeness that at first he dismissed as mere numbness inflicted by the chill night air, but as the sensation crept up his knuckles and flushed through his face, the beginnings of panic fluttered in his chest.  He groped at his face but found himself unable to properly feel through his thick velvet gloves.  Hastily he pulled off the right glove, revealing, to his horror, not the soft pink skin of his own familiar hand but a clawed, scaly thing '" a reptile's hand, or a bird's, the bony fingers tipped with black talons.  He opened his mouth to scream: the sound that issued forth was not a human gasp, but rather a squawking hiss (some claim this emanation resembled the susurrus of a snake, others the caw of a rooster, and a few insist the traveler hooted like an owl).  

Wretched and despairing, the cursed traveler pressed on even faster towards the Weeping Moon, no doubt in hopes of finding some warlock or hedge magician at the free house who might cure his affliction; but when he arrived at the wrought-iron gates of the old inn, the gate-guards mistook him for a crepuscular ghoul and promptly shot him full of quarrels, killing him instantly.  Needless to say, his fey liaison was reportedly unperturbed by the man's death, and proceeded to have a night of good cheer and wholesome debauchery in lieu of their planned business.
[/ic]

[ic=Gaolor]The witch unlocked the door to the cellar and began his descent, one hand trailing along the decaying brick wall, the other grasping a glossy black taper for light.  Flesh-colored boots padded down the slime-slick stone steps.  In the candle's flicker the witch's face was thrown into unnerving chiaroscuro, its hard lines sharpened, violet-stained smirk made crueler, wolfish yellow eyes more predatory.  The trailing hand tapped at the crumbling brickwork with long, black nails.

   At the bottom of the stairs the candlelight bloated to fill the high corners and skeletal vaulted curves of the Court with a swollen gothic glow.  A legion of shadows sprung forth from the dim recesses to cavort along the walls, caressing the grotesque marble gargoyles with lithe, black fingers.  The witch used his taper to light other candles about the room; the shadow-dancers withered and diminished.

   In the center of the floor, surrounded by a chaos of scrawled inscriptions, engraved wards, and circles of red powder, the creature squatted in a cage of black iron, peering at the witch through the bars with coldly hateful eyes.  It stroked its wrist with a seven-fingered hand and hissed.

   'Hello, Marquis Naberius,' the witch said, revealing a mouth full of sharp white teeth.  'I have questions for you.'

   The creature shifted its weight in its cage before venturing forth into the light.  A huge black raven's head sat on a slender body with dark purple skin etched with livid orange tattoos, like lines of flame.  The lower half was coarse and hairy, with canine paws and tail.

   'Music!'  The creature demanded, its voice welling with weird echoes, as if it were speaking across a long distance, or from deep underground.

   'How ill-mannered of me,' the witch apologized.  'One moment, my good Marquis.'  He crossed the Court '" careful not to break the protective markings on the floor '" and withdrew a small wax cylinder from a pocket of his long coat, which he inserted into a polished phonograph.  A strange, haunting music something like a nocturne began to play, filling the room with spectral voices and the spindly plucking of strings.

   'Ahhh'¦' The raven-headed thing sighed.  Its long digits traveled up and down one sinewy arm, lingering at the shoulder where black feathers segued into smooth humanoid flesh.

   'And now then, my excellent '"'

   'Hush!' The creature commanded, eyes squeezed shut, listening.  The witch's mouth twitched in irritation, but he allowed his captive several minutes to savor the lush macabre textures of the music.  While he waited he smoked a long cigarillo plucked with splendidly manicured fingers from an enameled ebony case.  Soon the air was filled with wraiths of pungent blue smoke.  The Marquis was making shadow-puppets on the wall, its fourteen spidery fingers contorted into fanciful configurations '" lion, three-headed wolf, winged serpent, a man and woman copulating.  A tremor of disgust and, beneath, quiet fear traveled down the witch's spine.  He twirled a black ringlet of his wig, and reminded himself of the wards he'd placed, the sigils he'd spent days laboring over before binding the creature to a corporeal manifestation.  Were a stray rat to evade the clutches of his vermin-catching homunculi and break even one of the circles'¦ He dismissed his anxieties as the Marquis stirred.

   'Very well,' it consented.  'Ask your precious questions, mortal."[/ic]

[ic=A Bargain]The creature manifested out of the verdurous gloom, congealing from the undergrowth, a sudden assertion of order on previously random elements. Thorny boughs and vines abruptly became lithe, elegant limbs, branches twisted into fingers, and a gnarled, red-eyed face formed itself from bark and earth while the air hummed and warbled with glamer. Branches knit together, solidifying into rough green-brown flesh, a taut, vegetative body; strands of thick moss formed matted locks of hair.

The faerie detached itself from the dense green darkness and crept towards him. When it moved it shed little accretions of forest-matter, stray leaves and twigs and clumps of loam.

Charles Casmyre pushed his sweaty spectacles back up his long, scholar's nose, tightened his already white-knuckled grip on his blunderbuss. Even with his greatcoat and hat to ward against the night chill he shivered. His mouth felt like sandpaper; his singed tongue still stung from the crackling, acrid potency of the incantation whose echo hung in the air, shimmering in its dissipation. As the faerie approached its fetid rankness filled the magician's nostrils, a pungency half decay, half cloying fecundity. Charles coughed.

'Why do you tremble?' Though the faerie's voice was little more than whisper it resounded throughout the forest clearing, full of terrible wisdom and ancient, mocking cruelty. 'Surely with your mighty spells and your iron bullets you do not fear one such as me? Is it my semblance that unnerves you? Allow me to put you at your ease.' The creature's face split into a jagged grin, and it passed a clawed hand across its visage. Where the hand moved its face changed, and then its body also; where once an eerie woodland spirit had crouched now stood a beautiful, androgynous figure with glossy, viridian hair and tight-fitting garb of gray-green satin. Only the crimson eyes remained unchanged, haunting and mesmeric.

'You have the remedy?' Charles tried to keep his voice steady. The horseshoe round his neck was cold against his skin. 'The elixir? That will restore her to health '" remove the curse, the sickness?'

'Distilled from a virgin's laugh and a melancholic's tears, with a tincture of a madman's daydreams and the crushed petals of a purple orchid.' The faerie withdrew a bottle from its garment, a vial of fuchsia liquid. 'Simply add a drop of your beloved's blood and a hair from her head and have her drink the potion down. And now'¦ do you have the skull of Osheran?'

'Yes, though the deeds I committed in its getting would make a cutthroat balk.' Charles felt a surge of anger and shame welling up to replace his fear. He clenched his teeth and withdrew the skull from his satchel '" old and yellowing, carved with mystic spirals, its eyes set with carnelian gems. The faerie pursed its lips and walked forward; Charles thrust out the skull before snatching the offered vial from the thing's slim, manicured fingers.

'Ah, my old foe,' the creature crooned, stroking the skull as if caressing a lover. 'How I raged when I found that you had taken your own life! To deny me the pleasure of your death, the throb of your veins under my fingertips, the quake of your terrified flesh'¦ but now you are mine, Osheran, and I have had centuries to plan new torments for your soul.'

'Then our bargain is complete.' Charles kept his weapon carefully aimed at the slender figure as he backed away into the Tangle's depths.

'Hmm? Ah, yes. You have done well, magician.' The faerie had withdrawn to the shadows; only the soft red glow of its eyes betrayed its presence. 'You have proven yourself a capable agent. Perhaps I will make use of you in the future.'

'Never again,' Charles muttered as the Trowe melted back into the night. He clutched the vial the faerie had given him to his breast as he trod the silver moonpaths of the fair folk's forest, back to his manse in the Edge where, unbeknownst to him, his lover now lay lifeless.[/ic]

[ic=Just a Squall]It started with a smell in the air. You could taste it on the wind '" a metallic tang, like copper. The sky began to dim. A distant thunderclap echoed across the endless dusty plain. Some thrice-damned fool gawping at the gathering darkness muttered that it looked like rain.

Then, in the distance, the mist. Not normal fog, thick and gray or gray-green or sallow, nor black like smoke, nor the brown haze of a dust-storm, but red. Abattoir red; a seething, roiling crimson.

We took cover as it drew closer, threw tarpaulins over the caravan, the damn horses neighing and pawing the hardpan. Already you could hear it, that steady roar, pounding the desert, mingling with the crackle of the storm-clouds, getting nearer. It churned the ground to viscous mud and the cracked, thirsty plains sighed and drank in the downpour.

And then it was upon us, out of clear sky, a torrent of it '" the Red Rain. It fell in dense sheets, covering everything with its sanguine slick, like some enormous beast had been slaughtered overtop us, or the godsdamned sky itself was bleeding.

Some idiot hireling we'd picked up back in Baranauskas got caught out in the thick of it. They say the change is supposed to be invisible, but I'd swear you could see something happen '" a hunching of the shoulders, a sudden cruelness about the eyes, a smirk stealing across the thing's red-streaked face, mouth dribbling the stuff. Every hand went to his gun, tore the fetch in half a dozen different directions, like a puppet being wrenched about, staggering in the muck, clutching his steaming guts and then falling in a twitching heap. It lay there hissing for nearly a minute while we reloaded, crawling towards us with one hand cradling its entrails and its teeth bared and its eyes full of evil till someone put a bullet between them and spattered its brains out the back of its skull.

Like that'd been a cue the Rain let up, moved westwards. We were lucky; we only had a squall. Sometimes the Rain'll last for hours, even days. They say during the Ravishing whole cities got drowned, streets swimming with red, those that survived the first downpour murdered by family and friends. Puts it in perspective for you.

One lousy sellsword doesn't seem so bad.[/ic]

Quote from: Steerpike[ic=Just a Squall]It started with a smell in the air. You could taste it on the wind '" a metallic tang, like copper. The sky began to dim. A distant thunderclap echoed across the endless dusty plain. Some thrice-damned fool gawping at the gathering darkness muttered that it looked like rain.

Then, in the distance, the mist. Not normal fog, thick and gray or gray-green or sallow, nor black like smoke, nor the brown haze of a dust-storm, but red. Abattoir red; a seething, roiling crimson.

We took cover as it drew closer, threw tarpaulins over the caravan, the damn horses neighing and pawing the hardpan. Already you could hear it, that steady roar, pounding the desert, mingling with the crackle of the storm-clouds, getting nearer. It churned the ground to viscous mud and the cracked, thirsty plains sighed and drank in the downpour.

And then it was upon us, out of clear sky, a torrent of it '" the Red Rain. It fell in dense sheets, covering everything with its sanguine slick, like some enormous beast had been slaughtered overtop us, or the godsdamned sky itself was bleeding.

Some idiot hireling we'd picked up back in Baranasukas got caught out in the thick of it. They say the change is supposed to be invisible, but I'd swear you could see something happen '" a hunching of the shoulders, a sudden cruelness about the eyes, a smirk stealing across the thing's red-streaked face, mouth dribbling the stuff. Every hand went to his gun, tore the fetch in half a dozen different directions, like a puppet being wrenched about, staggering in the muck, clutching his steaming guts and then falling in a twitching heap. It lay there hissing for nearly a minute while we reloaded, crawling towards us with one hand cradling its entrails and its teeth bared and its eyes full of evil till someone put a bullet between them and spattered its brains out the back of its skull.

Like that'd been a cue the Rain let up, moved westwards. We were lucky; we only had a squall. Sometimes the Rain'll last for hours, even days. They say during the Ravishing whole cities got drowned, streets swimming with red, those that survived the first downpour murdered by family and friends. Puts it in perspective for you. One lousy sellsword doesn't seem so bad.[/ic]

I love it, that sounds like an awesome thing to use in a campaign (I might just steal the idea if you don't mind).

Go for it.  I'd actually love to hear about how the Red Rain would play in a game...

[ic=Celerity]It was hot '" hot like the world had caught a fever, was sweating it out in the quivering air.  Everything was twisted with that queasy, shimmery haze, like you were looking at the reflection of the world in a warped mirror.  People were black shapes like children's drawings, undulating, jerking in and out of focus, faceless and faintly menacing; buildings writhed and loomed out over the steaming street, looking somehow hungry, coiling and uncoiling as you drew nearer; the corpulent sun snarled down out of the bleached and raw-blue sky.  You couldn't think, in heat like that '" your thoughts seemed to boil and your mind was like sludge, your memories flowing together wet and slippery as runny eggs, yolks popping in the heat, bursting in your brain, frothing out of your ears and nose and bubbling through your pores.  Time got thick and tarry; seconds stuck together.  Anything black burnt to touch.

High above a Hexwarren street a window shattered and rained down shards of glass even as a figure tore out of the hole like a bullet.  The thin, grinning man landed on heavy-booted feet and dashed down the street with uncanny quickness, almost too fast for the eye to follow.  In the slowed-down crawl of moments made viscous by the heat his hexed speed became a kind of violence, bruising the air with after-images as the man ducked around carriages and carts, weaving in and out of the motley crowd, round a whip-stitched servitor reeking of formaldehyde, a blind gutter witch who conjured a feeble dust-elemental before a crowd of gawkers, a ghul in a white suit buying books from a street-seller, shading himself from the sun with a frayed umbrella.  The running man grasped something tightly to his chest.

Half a breath after the building had spat the quick man out of its upper storey a blast of green, eldritch flame blew the rest of the wall away and spewed sulphurous smoke into the street.  A second figure emerged with a roar from the green pall, hulking and heavy, shoving passersby out of the way as he stomped after his quarry.  A huge man in a brown leather coat, his lips and hands singed from his spell, already growling some fresh incantation.

Round a corner, down a back-alley, over a rotting wooden fence, up a flight of worn stone steps '" Cythos laughed as he wound his way deeper into Baranauskas, revelling in his own agility.  Only have to make it to Resurrection Row.  He heard, vaguely, the pound of the bounty-hunter's footsteps behind him, an echoing boom as the thieftaker blew through the fence.  With simian dexterity Cythos swung up onto a low balcony and then shimmied up to the slate rooftop, digging grafted climbing-nails into the plaster and hauling himself up, then scurrying across the tiled expanse of roof and leaping to the next building.  He made it half a block before he heard the thud of his pursuer on the tiled roof behind him.  He glanced back but kept running; the hunter was moving fast, channelling as he made his huge, ungainly jumps between buildings.  Cythos ducked as the witch sent a swirling hex like a nest of effervescent serpents towards him; the spell struck a chimney and reduced it to a pile of corroded, molten slag.

Cythos jackknifed across a narrow alleyway and whipped out his pistol as the assassin gained on him.  Even as the end of the block drew closer the wiry thief squeezed off three shots, swore as a hastily invoked shield of force incinerated the bullets a few feet from his enemy's body.  Cythos skidded to a halt and scrambled down from the roofs, into Murrain Square, still, impossibly, holding the bundle to his chest; the imposing spires of the Fane of Dust rose up in the distance.  Graft pedlars scattered and clutched at their gruesome wares as Cythos ran across the square, followed closely by the giant man behind him.  A stray hex caught one merchant square in the chest, dissolving his flesh and leaving only a blackened skeleton behind.

Through the square, down another flight of steps, into a side-street '" to a dead end.  Cythos swore, turned even as a massive fist hurtled towards his head.  He dodged, wrenching his neck to the side, felt the man's arm sail just past him.  He tumbled backwards and brought up his foot behind him, kicking the man in the chest, then spun round and jabbed two fingers into the brutish witch's eyes.  The assassin stumbled back, stunned, and Cythos brought up his pistol, emptied his last three shots into his would-be killer's face.

Breathing hard and wrinkling his nose at the stench of burning flesh Cythos quickly checked his assailant's body, cursed when he found the tattoo on the back of the man's hand '" a black heart, wreathed in green fire.  He shivered.

'Well fuck me,' he whispered to his prize, the polished-black skull that stared up at him with empty sockets.  'You must be bleeding priceless for someone to hire the fucking Shroud to get you back.'

Drawing a cloak around him despite the heat he slunk out from the alley and dissolved into the chaos of the city, clinging to the cool and obfuscating shadows.[/ic]

[ic=The Hunt]The last upyr died in a soundless blaze of white light, a subtly tuned phase of energy that liquefied flesh and muscle, leaving a suddenly naked skeleton that rapidly collapsed into a pile of inert bones.  The scuttling vampires, hybrids of ghoul, toad, and lamprey with huge needle-fanged mouths and black membranous skins, had long plagued the local tribes, the mongrel and primitive clans of subhumans who eked out a ragged existence herding chitinous cliff-gaunts and brewing rude wines from the withered grape-vines that clung to the gray and pockmarked hills.  Repulsive as the bloodsuckers were, however, they were not Sir Magdhon's true quarry.  The beast he had followed across the pallid Bleak and the Nine Eastern Hellscapes was a much more singular being, feeding on substances considerably more rarefied than vulgar subhuman blood.

Nonetheless Magdhon found himself fighting his way through swarms of the quasi-mindless upyri, creatures that apparently had shunned his true prey when it passed through the region, as his Aura suggested.  He summoned the array of holo-fields and data screens with a quick mental invocation and scanned the information swiftly, while the sallow miasmas exuded by the upyr pack dissipated.  He rearranged the sequence of the overlapping, translucent projections with deft movements of his delicate white hands, eyes flickering.  He was well aware that he cut a striking figure, garbed as he was in a pristine white suit and hat, sword-cane in one hand and pistol in the other, surrounded by the desolate, misty hills and the bleached remains of his foes.  He muttered a command-word and the small, floating orb-drone that orbited above him began snapping shots of the battle-scene's aftermath.

Magdhon sifted through the data as quickly as he could, trying to isolate the signature trail of his quarry.  Soon more upyri would arrive, drawn by the psychic tremors that would now be rippling through their shared consciousness with the death of their brethren.  He would have to move fast '" the cell of his pistol had been depleted in the last fight and would take several minutes to recharge.  If the vampires caught him before the gun returned to an operable condition he would be forced to activate his shield and waste precious time while the beasts battered at it in futility.  Or he could summon his Gargoyle, of course, but doing so would disqualify him from the Hunt, whose rules forbade all but the crudest forms of transportation.  Lady Orz and Sir Lyonel would taunt him for decades if he was forced to abandon the Hunt because of some wretched band of semi-sentient animals, barely as intelligent as the local tribesman.  He would have to retire from Adventuring out of shame'¦

At last his Aura pinpointed his prey's trail, visualized a map for him based on the orb-drone's constant scans of the local topography.  He would head north, towards the narrow defile that led deeper into the Groaning Mountains.

Something snarled in the gloomy dusk as the ancient sun sank at last beyond the horizon.  The haze was thickening again, bringing with it the rancid musk of more upyri.  Sir Magdhon hefted his pistol and set off into the dimming twilight, smiling grimly, his amber eyes glimmering with the joy of the Hunt.[/ic]

[ic=A Wanderer]For years the wanderer had known only silence and the banal umber endlessness of the vague wasteland. He had been traveling so long that he'd forgotten where he'd started, or why. At first he's invented a new reason each day, a banishment or exile or quest, but as time went on the past dwindled and his mind wandered along with him. His was a grey existence, a world of blurred shadows, dust, and haze interrupted infrequently by a tombstone or a monolith or a meeting with some surreal creature. The few human (or human-like) beings the vagabond had seen were reduced to distorted figures scrawled in his memory, grown faceless and sinister as remembrance slipped inevitably away and his brain became a mottled, inward-looking thing, lost in its own dark, delirious passages. Only his most outlandish encounters had been burnt more vividly into his mind '" these would take much longer to scab over and scar, or drown in the sewers of his subconscious.

Once he'd met a six-armed and carapace-plated man like a giant fly or mosquito, riding a wagon drawn by four mechanical horses that breathed smoke and flame. The insect-man had tried to sell him oddities: a skull with bloodstone eyes, an embalmed foot, a fob-watch with too many hands, a live, bottled spider, a tiny gilt statuette of a winged infant.

Another time he'd crossed paths with a troupe of dancers, each tattooed in garish colours and garbed in diaphanous silks, cavorting and cartwheeling through the waste. Their lips were sewn shut, each mouth stitched into a different expression; they wore jeweled masks that covered the top halves of their faces.

Yet another time he'd passed by a weeping chimera, a queasy, pitiful, raving monster that constantly changed its shape, flickering through different bodies like a fleshy kaleidoscope '" now it had three limbs and a hairy visage, now a segmented tail, now a cluster of horns or extra eyes or wailing mouths, now a glistening chitin shell.

But mostly the waste was simply emptiness, flat and ceaseless and mute, carpeted with bones, with the remnants of past violence '" a slaughter-land. There was something of the desert to it, and of the library, and of a dull, meandering dream verging occasionally on a nightmare. The sun and moon seemed only to rise and set out of habit. To speak took great effort. A desiccated limbo '" a place of droning, half-heard echoes where time and size and sound seemed somehow soft, and moments ran together and dissolved.

And then, without warning, the City.

It crept up upon him wolfishly, like some huge, ineluctable predator '" brooding on the horizon, like a robed stone colossus or a prowling monstrosity larger than the mind could hold. The vagabond was overwhelmed by its defiance, its brute repudiation of the horizontal waste. After the omnipresent flatness, the sudden appearance of such sublime, audacious verticality seemed obscene, even horrific. Tears streamed down the wanderer's thin cheeks, and a sound cracked and then shattered the glassy silence, a fragile, eggshell sound, part sob and part laughter. He was surprised to discover that it came from his own mouth.

Suspicions circled vulture-like in the musty air before swooping down to gnaw at him. Was the City merely a mirage, the delusion of an unhinged mind? He knew that he was mad, had long been mad, perhaps always. He knew that his eyes were often untrustworthy, though never before had they conceived a vision of such lurid and convincing imagination. Or was the City something more dangerous than a mere phantasm? Was it was something subtler, more sinister '" an illusion sent by cruel and whimsical deities to torment him, taunting him with the promise of civilization, of escape, of change, while always growing further away, forever just out of reach? He looked around, suddenly terrified. Had he finally died? Was this the underworld, this City his punishment '" an eternity of seeking, never to arrive?

Had he been dead for years?

As he carried onwards the City drew closer, assuaging his fears somewhat. Detritus and ruins marked his approach: bent signs in dead languages, the rusting husks of ancient vehicles, more bones of humans and unlikely beasts, always more bones. Here and there a solitary wall might emerge from the blasted ground, its edges jagged and burnt.

After another eternity of walking the wanderer found a road, a decaying path half subsumed by the wasteland, impossibly old. The City grew larger with excruciating slowness, looming in the distance, quivering with waves of heat. He was a pilgrim, and the City quickly became something sacred. It was his God and his doom, though whether it would redeem or damn him he did not yet know; but as he came nearer a veil seemed to lift from his mind, a new clarity replacing the numbness of the desert.

He met others on the road, mostly solitary but a few in pairs or groups, heading in the opposite direction out into the emptiness behind him. It seemed that he had met them before, or others like them, in dreams or perhaps in the far distance of his past. A pretty, raven haired woman with a whirring mechanical arm traveled with a slimy beast with mouths on its palms whose toad-like skin blistered in the dry air; a man-thing shambled on clawed legs like a bird's, stitched crudely to his thighs; a melancholy figure in a dusty white cloak and cowl dragged an enormous iron sword along beside him, his face hidden beneath his hood. There was a cart of corpses and a tattooed woman with a tentacled hand and a goggle-clad madman leaning on a copper staff, a gun-toting fox-man and a dyad of blue skinned imps and a yellow-eyed dwarf who rode a chittering mechanical spider and smoked long, black cigarillos, puffing tendrils of smoke into the bruised twilight, a lumbering giant with iron skin plodding behind him. Some of these fellow travelers spoke to him (or themselves) in alien tongues, though the wanderer never answered.

Shuddering machines appeared in the distance, and cracked domes like huge boils on some behemoth fleshscape. After what seemed an aeon of walking the first plantations sprung up on either side of the road: rough, scrap-fashioned farms with withered crops and fields of fissured hardpan earth. At first the farms were abandoned, the bones of livestock and farmers alike overgrown with weeds and fungi, houses with beams like fragile bones and black sockets for windows, with roofs collapsing under their own weight and walls torn apart by creepers, planks sloughing off into clouds of orange wood-dust. Huge ravens and raven-like things infested these cadaverous places, picking at the dead.

Later, the plantations began to show signs of habitation, and leather-skinned farmhands would stare at the wanderer while they fed ugly pigs with matted hair or milked emaciated aurochs or queasy bovine-shaped darknesses. Here the shadow of the City grew oppressive, and the sky swirled with a constant pall of smog. He could make out the shapes of gargantuan chimneys, sprouting out from the main bulk of the towers, which now he could see were actually clusters, conglomerations of buildings piled atop each other without any apparent design or artistry. The hiss of those great chimneys rose up from the City over the murmur of lowing cattle and the yowls of the feline things like hairless cats that haunted the hinterland in packs. A thrumming beat like the tread of a million footsteps or the syncopation of a demoniac machine could be felt through the ground.

As the wanderer walked the road towards the City he began to delineate its details, its endless intricacies. Towers thrust themselves skyward in a thousand needling points, spined skeletons of glass and grey stone. Structures slumped rust-red and variegated, shimmering crimson in the sunlight; conglomerates were wreathed in smoke, all brass and brick and belching pipe. Neon signs winked and domes of cracked marble gleamed wetly like broken skin.

Soon he came to the shanties. They coalesced from the ruins and farmland in patchwork aggregations, coagulating out of the dust and debris and rising up in ramshackle layers '" a mishmash second city of wood and rope and mud spreading out beneath its stony parent, tumorous and uninhibited. At night the shanties wallowed in the buzzing artificial light of the towers and seethed with a rustic vitality. Here and there a distant suggestion of movement in the City itself broke the statuesque stillness momentarily.

At night the City was ablaze with light. The stars faded, consumed by its luminescence. The sky glowed about the horizon, softening into twilight.[/ic]

-

Wow...these stories are great, I can't wait for more. I really wish I could write like that.

[ic=Artistry]The thing in the vat regarded its creator with the vacuous stare of an infant. The fleshcrafter did not meet this dull, wet gaze but fiddled instead with the complex controls of a nearby console, tapping at keys and swearing beneath his breath. A moment later a hissing sound filled the large, domed chamber; and then fire erupted in the vat, and the creature screamed, flailing its limbs for a moment before the flame consumed it. Only a skeleton remained, charred and malformed, scraps of burnt flesh still clinging to the blackened bones. The witch sighed. Another failure '" another day wasted.

Rowan Moray was not registered with the Splicing Guild near the Witch's Gate. He was a freelancer, and if the Guildsmen ever noticed him, they would burn his studio to the ground with him still in it.  That he ate into their profit margins was enough to invite their hostility; that he operated beyond the pale of Guild protocol and regulation, refusing their arbitrary restrictions and small-minded narrowness of scope.  Fortunately, his business was small-scale, a back alley tissue-shop on the outskirts of the Skin Markets near the border between Wormhive and Velveteen Circus in downtown Baranauskas, far from the Guild Citadel in Hexwarren and its chambers of slick, echoing stone.

Rowan's studio was expansive and many-chambered. Space was far from precious in the City of Bodysnatchers: hundreds of rooms were deserted, whole streets and sectors inhabited only by rats and spiders. He had selected a three-leveled complex in a confusing block of musty streets, in the shadow of a Wormhive spire. A pair of bronze titans, sibling fire-bringers and obscure trickster gods, supported the arched entranceway, crowned with a buzzing neon sign: Body Modification '" Grafts, Fleshsculpting & Augmentation. A narrow antechamber followed, lit with the sepia glow of a fitful, naked bulb; through a hexagonal door (magnetically sealed while the shop was closed) was the shop level, its high ceiling lost in darkness, its wares displayed under lamps filtered yellow or crimson, like exhibits in a museum or, perhaps, sideshow attractions '" as befitting their grotesquerie.

One display case held a hand with seven fingers and bruise-purple flesh, with long talons black as obsidian, wires feeding it liquids or draining them out; beside it, another case held a mask of pale, living skin, a beautiful woman's visage placed over a mannequin head. In a larger tank a selection of newly-assembled creations bickered over a rat's carcass, while a two-headed snake with a pair of human faces hissed in its cage and uncoiled its iridescent, bifurcating body, a piece inspired by the naghini of the Bluebottle Archipelago. There was a selection of limbs and organic weapons, fangs and bony spurs and stinging tendrils. There were lungs that could breathe smoke or water, hearts that could beat faster, de-tox implants and glandular batteries of drugs '" all perfectly preserved, kept alive through an ingenious system of tubes and electric stimulations. The lamplight shone through the thin layers of flesh, dappling the domino-tiled floor with sallow illumination.

He catered to two distinct demographics. The first was composed of street-level thugs and toughs looking for an advantage in a brawl or bar-fight '" a bit of grafted muscle, an extra limb, steel claws and the like. Rowan considered this hack-work, the necessary toil to keep his establishment running '" scum of the sort he dealt with paid in cash, and their jobs were quick, crude, and simple. This sort of augmentation would be ignored by even the most vigilant Guild agent: it was simply too commonplace, too ubiquitous, the work of common graft peddlers in back-alleys or Tatterdemalion Court.

The second clientele base he maintained was considerably smaller and a great deal more affluent, the sort that would attract the ire of his larger, more powerful competitors if discovered. This second class of customers '" foreigners, aficionados, even some Fleshmongers looking to acquire some particular perversion on the cheap '" ordered strictly by commission, and their requests took weeks if not months to complete. But these commissions, while invariably strange to the point of grotesquerie, were far from hack-work. They were, at least in Rowan's mind, his masterpieces '" they were works of art.[/ic]