Early Palicas, 15 Moiraios, 14389
Dragons, devils, giants; armies of orcs, elves, and haergiothans; all fighting. A lone coyote stands on a high rock in the wilderness, howls at the moon amid the start of a blizzard. Hunched war machines remembered only in myth lumber without number over a rocky brown slope frosted with snow. Far away, flurries dance with fires. Islands and craft that sail the air and dart through the sky fly overhead, lances of white light and swarms of fast-moving embers crossing the open space between them.
Grey clouds under a black evening sky witness a profane new dawn: a weapon to invoke the sun's wrath in a single burst that insults gods with its scale and cold artifice. Armies and cities alike are burned, sky-islands half-melted and sent on altered courses to last eons. A mushroom-shaped cloud; and another, and another, chains of volcanoes awoken to unleash ash and magma and a winter to last centuries.
The coyote wanders the barren lands, a forlorn cry, shoulders hunched. The very air and land embittered with an unseen aura; the coyote finds no food or pack; it withers, its coat falls out. The coyote finally falls, exhausted, panting and hopelessly resigned--alone for decades, alone for centuries.
Around the still canine snow and ash turn to rain. Clouds finally part, green shoots break out from their stone creches. Forests return, called out by the coyote's rest. Life resumes, ignorant of the past's catastrophe as children grow up untold of parents' trauma--but the land remembers the Sad Bay of the Forlorn Coyote.
Runt's eyes open to the rocking of a boat descending a canal littered with half-sunk boats and debris. Light shines through huge portals on one side of a slot whose ceiling reaches up to the terrace they are leaving, this must follow the perimeter of the third terrace. She looks back to a man in matte brown-black leather and black clothing. Alyosha nods to her as he navigates with an easy smile the gradual incline to the next terrace down, puffing on a cigar. In the former soldier's smoke-veiled face she sees vestiges of her dream--her vision--devastation is devastation, the same seed across time and nations, the same bitter grain.
Her eyes close.
10:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
Precious little time for goodbyes; the century just won the corridor to evacuate the Morningstar shaft and another horde was inbound--ten minutes, by the diviners. The Primus accounted for everyone leaving and cast a final gaze up the shaft, its circular balconies connected to the branched metal lattice down the center. Dozens of hobgoblins laboring with the ease of pack predators, a single figure at the center like the alpha: the chief combat engineer and praecantor of the entire cohort. To him the Primus raises his sword, and the figure pauses, puffs on a cigar through a brass devil-mask and returns the gesture with a war pick, striking his brass breastplate--to show it would not spark--before saluting his young lord.
The Primus departs to resume his place at the front of the century and a mad chase to the surface. The vassals protecting the leave-behind party and their Infernal Knight superior roll the shaft door off its rail with a final low crash. Not long after a series of crumps: the collapse of the corridor just beyond, as well as several connected to it--excepting the path the Primus chose to get everyone out.
Now the leave-behind party are truly alone. Smokey considers the door a moment, then looks up while taking a drag. Many of his soldiers, masked Praecantors, sappers, and a few priestesses, finished their work on the metal frame and teamed up to help one another. He turns his gaze to the remaining open siege door: their escape, chosen because it led to the… thing the Primus and the Lady were convinced the invading beasts were vying for, and had no known connection to the rest of the underworks save what hobgoblins could mine.
An hour later, Smokey stitched his brow under his mask at leaving charges and circles behind like this: coaxing spirits of fire and heat, just to keep them alone in the cold and dark for hours before having them fuck off back to whatever realm they were painstakingly called from. He knew the younger sappers behind him rolled their eyes, but on the catwalk in front of the door they were to leave by, he left a wool blanket with his ration of chocolate on it. "For your comfort in this lonely place, friends," he said as he set a metal flask of tea next to the offering. "Just a few hours, and you'll be back home."
The Infernal Knight put a hand on his shoulder as only an old friend could and beckoned him follow. Smokey was the last out, and closed the siege door himself, not flinching when it fell off its mounting and crashed in place. Before him knelt four subordinates inking a magic circle into the stone floor of the antechamber, a lantern in the middle. "Put three hours' fuel in the lantern," he told them. "Anything from the advance team?" a priestess broke her concentration and grinned.
"Just construction the likes of which you never even fathomed."
His avuncular tone damped her enthusiasm. "Pass along my order to fall back to the spiral staircase. Nobody touches anything. We don't know anything about this place, and simpler design means older construction. Older construction means even worse horrors for interlopers. Tell those lazy cusses to stay alert." A part of him mentally stayed behind in the giant shaft, imagining the unsettling quiet and distant sound of calamity impressing on the spirits left behind--alone--practically abandoned.
14:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios 14389
AT NOON THE earth shook once with a single note they felt more than heard. Tiber and the paladin cast their vision impatiently while the rest looked about. Was the light rumbling a precursor to the superheavy demon lurking under the city, about to churn their neighborhood and finish what their other foes could not?
Instead, to their relief with uncertain dread, the Morningstar shifted in place, as if to kick up white chalky clouds against the darkly marbled grey sky. Then each man's unspoken dread deepened as the clouds of dust reached up to strangle the keep and pull it underground like any of their own clandestine hands in the shadows around the neck of unsuspecting thralls the past week.
All eyes started when an agitated dry staccato burst from Rattles, and they saw him shift about with something approximating unease, mostly moving his stiff shoulders and head in the manner of someone making a pleading emphasis with their hands, approaching the sergeant as if trying to tell the group beyond just those present of the reckless risk they as a large collective were taking.
Staff Sergeant Tiber Klepacki just pointed to the skydocks, beckoning the ancient to follow him; the undead started off in the direction of the huge structure, a massive sundial and shadow under the overcast sky.
THE RUMBLING MUST have awoken her lizard brain before the rest of her, Runt suspected; this, the second thing she thought after regaining her wits.
The first was recognition that the fearsome keep co-dominating the apex of Thunder's Vale sank into the not-earth without much more than a chuff of debris around it and evacuating the various entrances to the heavily-tunneled underworks. Before long, the cloud blended in with the overcast sky.
But this recognition crossed her after she woke up--sitting upright and facing the commotion far away from and above them. Alyosha and a few others nearby asked of her. "The rumbling. Sound-without-sound travelling through the ground and not the air. My lizard brain must have picked up on it before the rest of me could even wake up…"
She sat in a raft on the edge of an outflow-pool. Before her arrayed the forty-seven other Russet Kites in a temporary camp nestled in a wide alley between two buildings fractured with collapses but still standing. Her audience were bandits, mercenaries, thieves and rogues, and hedge-witches like herself. Many were displaced nobles and their retainers. How long someone was with the band was shown by how much their wardrobe over time evolved to the informal uniform of dark brown matte armor, dark green, and a brown-russet plaid.
"Or before even we could notice, serpentina," chimed a well-intentioned but abrasive brat with the manners of a lower-noble who left finishing school unfinished, and to whom a mane coon would whisper cribbed hedge-magic.
Everyone paused--even the mane coon looked up from the business of its ass--to quietly observe the Morningstar sliding perfectly into the grounds of the kaczern. All the more remarkable for how little the rest of the city was physically disturbed. Runt counted two terraces between her and the keep--she was on the second terrace, where the working classes and poor of Thunder's Vale dwelt and worked. The brat offered Runt a roll of leaf; the inferness put one end in her mouth and flipped it around with thumb and foreclaw. The first end glowed.
"So much for the 'ruthless' hobgoblins," tchka'd a voice from the very back of the party. "Were they as merciless or practical as the reputation they painstakingly cultivate, they would have spared the caution demolishing just the keep."
All turned to look down the alley. A weighty landing's stairs pointed in the direction the alley sharply turned. A figure leaned on the balustrade, light framing him from a large hole exposing wide stairs behind, one branch of a larger staircase. Just beyond, the building still tried to tease a semblance of opulence in a grand foyer incongruent with the working-class district.
As the building, so the man, cast like an actor on a backlit stage: Enochab, whom the Russet Kites looked to for leadership and guile, ennobled the rough attire that kept the Russet Kites their name. Sharp features, fair hair, hawklike eyes, and a tight, regal set of antlers sweeping back from his forehead impressioning every notion of quickness.
"But the job remains unchanged. We get to the doors. But that?" he thrusted his flaxen goatee at the cloud of dust. "All the better for us! In a few days, Point Radovic hangs over this mildewy pile. By then, we have to get to the doors, I have to do what our employer told me in confidence to do. We take the Point's crone-gate back to Lidovica, and from there an easy trek to Cascada and our reward." He jumped down from the landing, walking the alley's length.
"This mission has been a bigger royal bastard than the Prinz-Vyzo," a surprise jab at the sovereign of Lidovica; "you all followed me to Cascada once already to smuggle aboard a skysle for a grim voyage to backwater Arcadia--pardon the redundancy--and then holdup, burgle, and thieve our way to the neverending bush war between Arc Royal and their demon-loving abyssal cousins. Then the Abyss and their Tijak thralls from dead Sidonia decided to launch a war." He snorted. "Then the towers in this godforsaken city began scorching everything in sight."
"But we've cultivated and practiced agility in tight spots, and these just sweeten the reward and ferment the glory--we're already famous in Lidovica and the rest of Greater Niyaroda; after this lone job, the name Russet Kites will fly around Arcadia also--and we'll be sitting neat in our new home when it does! I turn it over to the scion of Sarlatoviyi." He gestured to Runt, presently dragging on her roll.
"I found this map on one of their scouts I killed under the city," she puffed, holding a map that was pinned to an abandoned guardroom door she hid in from their scouts under the city. She avoided thinking about the anonymous and probably undead individual who did the pinning as everyone puffed a symphony to get a clear view. "You can see how the mapped tunnels trace a pretty large structure that starts under the fifth terrace near where the keep was," she flipped page upon page, circling with her roll a slightly-changing curved void on each, "and follows a contiguous shape…" the shape got slightly bigger and did not end at the bottom of the stack, "down to gods-know-where." Runt's mind briefly returned to the black depths and telluric winds below the city, and for an instant questioned the wisdom of interloping on whatever the core of Thunder's Vale really was.
"I mean, you all can read the land as well as I: there's an entrance near the top, under the fifth terrace, the kaczern as they call it. Enochab tells us the doors are ancient--maybe antiquitant--and looking at this city, the land must have shifted and the city built up over the centuries. If there's an entrance, it's up here," she tapped a foredigit to a runoff corridor near the base of the Morningstar. The lines poked into the negative space further than any other. "The hobgoblins exercised care demolishing the keep. I think they and the Amortians figured out the attackers' game and cut off access from the rest of the underworks--but left a corridor open, otherwise they would have gone hog wild with the fireworks."
"And we can assume whatever dusty tunnel the Arcadians preserved surfaces there," concluded Enochab, pointing to the skydocks with a finished cigar he tossed into a small campfire. A torrent of sun poured through a diaphanous spillway in the thick clouds over their destination. "We're infiltrating a military cordon during a siege. I want everyone sharp and on the ball. Finish off your coffee, no wine or spirits!" Runt understood that was for the newer Kites; the sight of the skydocks seized her attention now that daylight allowed her to gaze on the docks, platforms, and cranes covering a cyclopean fane in the shape of an arrowhead pointing midway up the sky's dome. It was taller than even the Morningstar was, with a foundation shared between the third and fourth terraces.
Whatever else he was about to say, more rumbling cut off. Not the shallow rumbling of the Morningstar's demolition or the huge demon or demons that cracked every foundation and cornerstone she saw getting to the surface. The way it travelled from deep underground, the frequency and magnitude, did Runt know it came from even deeper--below the montane saddle the city sat on. Her unease that it came from so deep and only her acute senses sussed that out put her at enough disquiet she did not register the towers' wailing until she felt her heart racing.
Covering her elven ears and shielding the base of the reptilian horns behind them, she looked around. Most of the Kites had it worse, but Enochab stood looking at the fire-spitting artifacts; she knew his tells, and he was hiding how shaken he was--not by the monoliths' noise, but because he understood what they were saying.
A METALLIC FEMININE scream-like note filled the air, overwhelming the senses and clawing at their skulls and minds. They reeled when it stopped, the young guards gasping and the mercenaries making oaths. The Arc Royal soldiers bearing their dead comrade strained no to drop him. The towers spoke in one voice resembling that of the undead… and the gibbering mobs, if either tried speaking in a calm, even tone. Most looked around, some looked at Rattles--and saw him looking from one monolith to the next. He repeated one short, simple word, the understanding tacit in context: something dire just happened. The undead turned to Sergeant Klepacki and its default coarse tone rang of additional admonishment, softening only as it stomped ahead down the ramp to the third terrace and the cordon of the surviving Arc Royal forces.
16:00 Palicas, 15 Moiraios, 14389
MORE GAPS IN the clouds let through the sun, a too-rare sight during the past week's neverending siege. Smoke and the mist common in mountains made a champagne light, the sentries indistinct silhouettes on the dark mass of the wall to the docks district. Tiber and his seven companions--and further back Rattles--stood among the overflow, crates and covered pallets of every size, grouped by what they held, and the packed neighborhood surrounding that was what one would expect to be next to docks, save those closest to the wall that were burned to the ground for line-of-sight. The light was blocked in one quadrant of the sky by the black mountain of the skydocks. One of the shadowed sentries approached, an Arcadian in the blue plaid of Arc Royal.
For the times Tiber left the cordon and came back, always with a larger group than he left with and all confirming successful hunts, the sentry had the gall this time to speak as one with something to not disclose. "I understand you brought back some more survivors, Sergeant." The previous times the sentry was practically enthusiastic he brought anyone back at all.
"With the path clear, I sent them ahead with the forward group while we covered the rear against the mobs. I trust they arrived," Tiber's speech was halted trying to suss what was with the sentry.
"They did arrive," the sentry said, hand on hilt, face unmoving while he panned the group. "They told us to expect another guest." Guest? Was this guy reading lines?
"One who knows something about the monoliths, and has other information we need…" he trailed off when the Old Man emerged from behind a pallet of wagon wheels. A steady glance around and seven casters surrounded the group; he saw the mage rest a gloved hand on a rigid leather pouch at his left hip. "…Stanis, take everyone into the cordon, check on the others." Silence. "Stanis--"
"Sure, Ty." The team filed past the Old Man, each looking at him, he never taking his gaze off Tiber and the undead a stone's throw back. The pedestrian gate opened in the main gate and they each passed through in sullenness, the final two bearing the kid slain by the corpulent Emergent.
While Tiber glanced with the ease of a man with no burden to prove himself, the Old Man, an ethnic Arcadian, bore down with green eyes like jade hammers; a shaved head and a greying red beard, beret frogged under the right epaulette of a loam-colored field blouse with MACPHAERMIDH on his right breast and the sleeves rolled to make room for heavy gloves of the same brown color as his jackboots. Lastly, the tartan of his kilt was hunter green and copper with some purple--not just a warmage, but the royal corps of warmages.
"Tell me what you brought with you." It was an order, practically made in the past tense.
"Undocumented type of undead, with memories that happen to be important to what's going on. The monoliths, the prehistorical structures under the city, and possibly the enemies we fight."
"And you read it?" he said, seemingly relaxing his tome-arm.
"Yes, and I'm guessing you read it already, are reading it now, and see exactly what I saw, which is nothing." A thick shaft of sun opened over them, angled with the afternoon. MacPhaermidh cast a tilted glance at the undead, as if surprised the creature did not flinch in the light.
"Don't be smart with me, khlapetso." Did he just boyo the Lidovic word for boy? His pouch was suddenly open and empty, his tome-arm up, holding a thick book which opened on its own. His right hand extended, making a gesture, and the cobblestones spat chains. Hexagonal links of granite shook sprues loose and darted past Tiber, wrapping around the undead like a sea creature, and were followed by more chains. The priests each weaved prayers and gestures; some animating physical chains of different materials, others conjuring chains of smoking shadow, misting light, and chromatic energy.
Rattles barely moved during the coordinated display, the undead turning slightly to get a look out of curiosity. When all the summoned, animated, transmuted, and conjured chains ran their lengths, the undead struggled not a modicum. To Tiber, it seemed to bow its head and emit a rattle [!] he though sounded like a sigh.
"Sir, it doesn't seem terribly bothered," said one priest.
"How do you know it's memories?" the Old Man asked Klepacki, not taking his gaze off the armored monster.
"It showed me," as the Old Man demanded what!? "while I was laid unconscious by a descending fiend."
"Lady Bochra wants you to report directly to her. She can read you and determine whether you're corrupted." He motioned with his head and the other mages and priests began moving to the gate while the guards opened the large heavy doors. "We're taking this thing to the chapel of chains." He looked over his shoulder at the sergeant. "Fucking reckless for a laity like you to let your mind get opened like that, Klepacki," MacPhaermidh said as he and his team filed through the gate, Rattles held aloft between them.
LE CORDON COOKED up a blue attitude as an undead of unknown variety and disposition was floated through in chains by three priests and five mages, all veterans of the multigenerational bush war between Arc Royal and the demons enthralling the present inhabitants of dead Sidona. Regardless of time and place, a city looked the same under the shadow of close-in warfare. Everyone engaged in the labors, great and small, overt and subtle, of flipping a siege against their would-be annihilators, with the exception of soldiers resting between sorties--the exception that proved the rule.
The sights which passed Rattles, same as in centuries passed, were nigh irrelevant as what happened under the proverbial surface. Every living person platooned as far up the war-fighting hierarchy as possible: able-bodied civilians in ersatz uniforms handling less-critical or -dangerous work so professional soldiers and members of orders-militant can focus fully on fighting the enemy; skilled tradesmen stooped and bag-eyed, given virtually anything they want and refusing most of it; all the way down to the infirm scavenging everything to be used as war-material, seniors mending uniforms and lighter armor, and children making the small sachets of coffee packed between gum and lip--an assumed-common practice among soldiers in this time and place.
Someone painstakingly tutored by royal architects and siege engineers could pick out the buildings still standing here were closer-in than those once outside the cordon and now half-demolished. The same volume of perforated demons fell here as elsewhere, but these stood strong as scrumming men with their arms locked. One could see repairs carefully prioritized with an eye for expedient strength above all else.
The assumed sights of queues for rationed food and the attention of physicians mundane and otherwise; work-leaders giving tasks to the idle, who quickly absconded to their labors. Everyone armed in some manner, everything laid out for organization, visual recognition, and quick access.
Hardly anyone took notice of the veteran casters and one of the kingdom's best mages leading the comical bundle of assorted chains and the helmet, gloves, and boots poking therein. The procession passed through a square where all major roads in the district converged, and two parties espied the undead's eyes from where they sat talking at a bench in front of the Cordon's major tavern-turned-lower parliament.
To the onlookers, including his hobgoblin companienne, the Old Bird paused at the sight of the casters and steadily arose to strike his breast with his right hand before raising it in the procession's direction--and the Old Man noticed, and responded. Both geezers got on well, and even Praecantrix M. Lau assumed the brannoch made the greeting out of another day survived. But it was odd the Old Bird kept the salute up a moment longer than the Old Man, who resumed his cadre's path to a tall mess of buttresses, spires, and windows of red stained glass just off the square.
"Sorry about that, little lady, just greeting an old friend," said the bird. The woman next to him--he learned she was practically a girl--shrugged with her arms on her knees.
"I'm so exhausted I can't stay awake, but the visions are so awful I can't stay asleep. I know it's only been half a day, but not even my meditations help and my prayers are too incoherent…" sighed Lau through a wooden cup of something she realized she hadn't a taste for as soon as it was served steaming hot.
"Until now you guys only engaged them--occasionally--in the wilderness, end even then not in these numbers or this concentration of their walking fodder," the bird said as he took a pull from a bottle. "A lot of these people are veterans of the never-ending bush wars against the Tijakim and their Abyssal masters, or were settlers who had their walls breached. It's a worn-out, much-despised tactic of the Tijakim's fodder--their mobs and thralls, to use local vernacular--to stab at their enemies' faces and loins." He remembered something he decided to keep to himself, took another pull. "It's normal to have nightmares about it afterwords, their thralls probably carry and spread imagoes like regular diseases to inflame the mind instead of the body." She shuddered her sigh. "Doesn't make it any less horrendous, though…"
She sniffed in a very uncultivated way. "And why the alternation between the Abyss, the Tijakim, and Sidona? Or Sidonia? Sidonis?"
"Different takes on practically--for us, for now--the same thing. The region and the nation which once dwelt there were named for the river Sido. The place of settlement. But they were wiped out, taken over by who would later be known as the Tijakim--who serve certain Abyssal powers." The brannoch looked to the large temple back from the street. "But those were ancient times."
She got up with the aid of a crutch. "I need to get back. Make myself useful to dressing up their wounded."
IRON-SHOD DOORS of iron-dark wood were opened by two ersatz guards to let the head warmage and his cadre through with their prisoner. Inside, just past the lower ceiling of an antechamber, a huge open volume of red and amber light; a floor arranged into rows of cots and pallets instead of seats and pews. Almost all were occupied by soldiers and guards too injured to labor in the cordon, much less sortie or fight. Wings to either side of the space were similarly occupied, the edges lined by those who could still sit upright. None the expected noises of pain and misery, instead the buzz of prayers of every sort--and not merely the hum of priests and nuns praying, or the chaplets of the injured and faithful, but the energy in the air when prayers were answered in this holy space.
The undead's sudden rattle after passing the threshold went noticed by the casters. A torrent of conflicting energy washed over the ancient, pulling at its animating force, pressurizing the glowing fluid in its body, impressing on a displaced soul, inflicting a metaphysical autoimmune response. Every voice lowered in the presence of the unclean thing led through in chains. A man's height above this rose the back of the church, a stone dais where a surgery took the place of a sermon, the lectern holding a field kit. Where deific attention would concentrate to save souls it was prayed would save lives and limbs, in the case of the current attempt at closing a femoral artery.
Two more double-doors at the back of this, opened by the foremost two casters, to a crescent-shaped arcade around a crescent of stairs around a lune-shaped dais that took up most of the semicircular rear sanctuary. Above stretched the main steeple of the whole church, all stained glass turning all light the glorious color of sunset. The cadre summited the dais with their undead prisoner; with a few gestures, chains hanging down from the walls slithered free of their fallen chandeliers to join their mundane counterparts binding the undead to hold him in place, in the middle of the dais, arms outstretched like a priest mid-exclamation. With several more gestures and words, the flat club and crossbow float off the undead, a garland of sling bullets jump out and away to clatter down the stairs, and somehow several bottles of alcohol emerged from the folds of the undead's belted plaid.
"Saints alive, sir, it has a hurley as a weapon," chuckled a mage. They assumed it focused on him because he was the first to speak, not because of the particular terminology he used. MacPhearmidh grunted acknowledgement. The creature barely moved, turning it's glowing gaze to the windows and then the columns lining the arcade.
“This thing is not like any undead I have seen in person nor recorded by decent academics,” spoke the head warmage to the priests and other mages as he drew a small roll of leaf from a pocket and lit it with a touch. “Most perturbingly, it lacks any cosmic alignment. Deacon-Lieutenant MacCormagt's underlings are on the money saying it was as if the husk is possessed, haunted, reanimated, et cetera." He puffed, looked back to his adjutant, also a royal warmage and attired as he. "Escryed, also."
"None of which were severed or dispelled when we crossed the threshold, hoss," said the adjutant after lighting his own roll also. By now everyone smoked, even the priests after making supplications--for whom tobacco carried weight under the eyes of their warrior-deity. "So whatever's watching still has eyes on it."
"The forces were weakened, to be sure, but remained. I should add, they were disproportionately affected," chimed in a priest still lighting a nose-warmer.
“I just want to get rid of it,” MacPhearmidh phlegmatically told them, to their muted approval. “We have lives to save. Too many failures on that count—too many friends dead,” almost a whisper. “But I do want to study this thing—that much the Staff Sergeant got right; still don’t know why the heavens he enlisted…” His fingers nearly grasp one of the helmet's horns, mentally noting he did not recognize whatever animal they came from, and the thing raises its head, it’s eyes flaring for an instant—as if glaring at him. “Let’s just ward the chains and doors. Whatever it is, it’s at least placid.” The monster resumed looking down to one side of the entrance.
Through side-doors lining the arcade as well as the dais the cadre adjourned to attend the very business the Old Man spoke of--some were likely not to come back. MacPhearmidh's adjutant left through the main doors they entered by, pawing his pockets and grunting under his voice in confusion. He closed the doors as he assumed he left his cigar-case at his bed.
The instant the locks of the doors clicked, a figure emerged from behind a column too thin for a mortal to hide behind, pulling a roll of leaf from a leather case bearing the charge of the royal warmages. Features existentially encrypted, black clothes that cost money to look plain and nondescript but professional as the same time. The figure spoke with a non-regional diction so distinct as to be its own accent in a voice similarly encrypted.
“My sympathies for the abruptness of your reanimation and lack of explanation afterwards. A necessity, to ensure your intactness, and you needed time to reacclimatize your soul to your body.” The finger-sized cigar embered on its own, reflected in the lenses of black glasses before fading behind smoke.
"Those quaint 'naturalists' encoded a reanimation ritual on your mind, body, and soul. Your entire being. Set to execute when certain conditions were met, thresholds crossed. A literal 'dead hand'. Many of my colleagues wanted to hack the ritual, prematurely activate it when the rift first opened--they felt time of the essence and worth the risk of tampering with your being. I appealed to our… superordinates, and someone took a personal interest in you. To let things play out. To let the ritual execute as the usual rulers of your nation—and to give your name and deeds time to acquire more weight.” The figure climbed the stairs to the dais where Rattles was suspended spread-eagle.
“Unfortunately, you will discover the weight of your reputation is more on your shoulders to bear than in your hands to wield. A challenge, but in time you should find a way to turn that fearsome legacy to your favor. In the meantime…” The figure breathed a plume of aromatic smoke, and one of the figures high above rendered in stained glass suddenly disappeared, the panels bereft of all color but the grime and ash of the city. "He is the servitor who watches this sacred place. With this invasion, he shows eagerness to prove himself to a mutual acquaintance of ours."
The servitor formerly in the stained glass appeared next to Rattles and the figure, and unlike the latter, was not encrypted nor dressed out of time--he wore antiquated armor, and his eyes glowed with heaven's wrath.
"Do take care of him," said the figure, handing the servitor the cigars before departing through a side door.
"Are you talking to me, or this guy?" asked the angel as he doffed his helmet. A metallic cast to his pale skin, copper hair and mustache; and his eyes--otherwise able to pass for an athletic man of average height.
"Yes," came the reply as a locked door opened to another world and shut. The angel furrowed his expression as he brought a cigar to his mouth. As he dragged on it, it came to life with an unquenchable fire nothing could douse.
"Well, here we go." He stabbed a hand into the undead's breast.