The Captain caught on quick as Baethen gestured frantically towards the briarwombs and then his blinded-eye. Haviershan was no fool and took to promulgating orders for a single file formation with Baethen at the back—his flesh-warping cards would protect him from scarlet rot, the arcana of the Crucible of Daedolon having taken root such that it left no quarter for the Ichor of Yurnmagog. Even beneath the near-impenetrable living suit of sorrow-steel, he could call upon the Devil’s scales to clad him for a time should the worst come to pass.
Their withdrawal was a fast and furious affair that bought time for the cadre to react to the coming threats of the right-hand path. They paid for it in blood, Baethen a good ten strides behind the throng, cutting through hagroots like a madman. He’d trained with Lac a few martial forms dedicated for retreat, the footwork weaving such that he never crossed his feet and tripped, even walking backwards.
It was all diagonal slices and then spin and reset from the opposite direction, building momentum until it reached a fever-pitch. [Cruciata] sung in his hands a keening war-dirge, wicked and cruel and joyous with each limb of hagroot severed.
The little bit of flame and heat he could kindle with his half-discarded deck and half-used arcanums, Baethen sacrificed on the altar of [The-Blade-Alone], chilling his blood so that the briarwombs’ vanguard slowed in their march. The frontline became a choking point as feyry frost-fire spread through it, freezing scarlet-rotted elementals into dry ash-mounds lambent with cerulean cinders.
Even with the spread of the wyrd tongues of fire, the briarwombs were not abated, not truly, only slowed and only for a while before Baethen sapped the last bit of warmth from his veins. But they did not need to last for eternity, only until they reached the cubic stone.
The right-hand path was a serpentine affair, winding this way and that through the Feywilds though for Baethen it was all but a blur of colour, vibrant viridians and vivacious vermillions mixing and clashing. Rather than a peaceful stroll through the woods, it was a frenetic rush marked by fire and sweat.
They were not yet where they needed to be and Baethen had no choice but to sip upon the Devil’s offered chalice. His sparks, dying things with nary enough warmth to light dried tinder, blazed with a second wind as scales crawled along his skin like snakes for serpents were the spawn of dragons.
Perhaps it was a trick of the light but Behemoth’s features sharpened, devolving into a bestial rictus grin. The eyeless head had no eyes with which to see yet its predatory gaze was felt nonetheless, the hagroots writhing before the presence of the Fifteenth Hand. This did not stop the briarwombs from their offense, instead doubling their fervour as they snarled back for feyries suffer no snakes amidst their court.
They had enough of those already, afterall.
Drunk on anger and branded with the sin of wrath, Baethen took upon the draught of sleep, that dreamless ignorance of Hypnagogia’s waters. [Cruciata]’s haft shone all the colours of the Bifr?st, tongues of subliminal feyry-fire licking at its length, arcana bleeding off of it in droves.
A rainbow conflagration spread from his ministrations, the arcana of feyries like locusts upon ripe crop. Baethen’s mind teetered on the precipice of waking nightmare, visions of half-born fantasies and realities superseding his grasp of what was actually in front of him.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
The hagroots turned into serpents, a thousand-thousand eels copulating in a bacanal that would beggar even the orgies of Lust Herself. The trees grew hands upon their limbs and crying faces upon their trunks, reaching out to grasp him in their thrall, wanting nothing more than to caress his temples and tell him that Mother knew best. The skies, oh how the skies bled, the firmament weeping cerulean blood that dried before ever touching the earth.
Just a moment before oblivion, Baethen let go of the cards he held so tightly in his Hand. He did not Redraw them, simply not putting them into play upon Eot. His head still swam with a quagmire of fantasy and unreality, both his eyes betraying him, even his one good one. Shadows and colours swam about him and he did his damndest to parse what truly was from what he conjured up himself.
By sheer luck—which was a fickle thing within Feyrie, within Fate’s domain—he got his wits about him in time and did not drown under the coming host of hagroot and briarwombs, taking once more to the retreat, not routing but neither succumbing as he almost had just a blink ago. Lumbering and stumbling his steps as his footwork was ravelled back into their bolt, Baethen returned to a semblance of discipline, striking out without calling upon [Cruciata]’s many poison-gifts, treating it as a simple weapon and nothing more.
Sin-brands snuck up easily upon the soul; just like the vices from which they sprung up. Wrath bade him to violence and Hypnagogia to slumber—combine that with avarice’s insatiable want to steal all that he possessed and it was a recipe for disaster. Though he’d averted his demise just a hair before perdition proper, he knew it was only time until it happened again.
One does not play with fire without being burned.
He knew this intimately, having been the first lesson that Big Yldira taught him. To respect the power of the flame, that it could and would maim and kill and destroy if given the chance.
Funny how simple things were the hardest to remember.
It was a long and turbulent withdrawal, with Baethen almost falling in exhaustion many a time as his strength failed him and his might fled. Were it not for Behemoth functioning as a lead-maiden without the spikes, he would not still be standing. Moros wept, that little bit o’ allegory might come to bite him in the arse.
It might end up becoming his coffin proper like that of a death-saint of Nagalfaram, an unliving martyr brought forth through sacred necromancy to recount stories of old. Just as many bloodlines kept their accumulated ken strictly guarded, so too did the ranks of clergy.
The end of that morbid thought coincided nicely with Baethen turning around and taking in the sight of the clearing. This was what lay at the end of the right-hand path: a great twisting skeleton of a tree, its roots mimicking the above boughs perfectly such that it was difficult to divine which came first. A reflection of itself, caught between two mirrors that no longer were.
The phantasmagoric vegetation encircled the barren waste of a clearing with the bone-white, leafless tree at the middle of it all. The division between the ashen soil and the rest of the Feywilds was stark, as if Feyrie Itself was scared of approaching the Yggrdrazil shoot. Rather than entrenching within soil, the sapling was halfway submerged within still-waters that were translucid and crystal-clear, hosting a night sky rather than the dayful firmament of this part of Phantasmagoria.
Baethen knew that substance down to the marrow of his bones, having used it to save his life before entering the evergaol—it was a whole pool of [Celestial-Dew], sequestered away within the shadow of a shadow. Just touching a carte-blanche to the stuff would be enough to form a card and there was enough there for all of the expedition and then some.
There was no ziggurat, no large ruin that a Guardian might protect. There, affix’d the cubic stone lay above the placid waters, one of its corners alighting upon them just so, as if balancing upon the waters.
And between the cubic stone and the cadre, between damnation and salvation, between Yurnmagog and Babylon, was the fallen angel. It flew on the wings of moths, its ivorywood bones now apparent. Each one was a branch of Yggrdrazil, each one a divine limb of the World-Root, of the Tree-of-Life.
The boggart’s faceless face had but a single great trumpet of an ear placed upon the middle and from it, a Word sprung forth. It was the shifting of the seasons under order of Gwynedd-Sol, a proclamation from the Unseelie Court that it might wage war, the weeping of the stars as they were ground into salt for trespassing upon Eot.
“[Duende.]”
Arcana Interlogia
Map of the Kolithil Worldshard
Cruciata the Curse-Fire
Arcanum of Hypnagogia
Arcanum of Fire
Ta-ta.