Many Miles Before I Sleep

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The late hour concealed him as only the lonely shadows were capable of doing, as the world preferred it, to keep him as far removed from the minds of the living. Nature's pity cloaked him in silence to forget his heavy tread, the hard passage of frost and doom, that left a trail of poison and blight in its wake. A fire-blackened statue sealed away in ancient, battered plate armor held together with tiny, interposing webs of chain mail stood beside Cambree's Tea House - a place he had visited shortly following his arrival in Myrken Wood.

The Swinton woman had provided him answers readily enough.

Tonight was not a night for answers, however, but a night for possibilities. Possibilities held behind wood, glass and whatever hopes the Apothecary owner possessed that he might be spared the blatant insult of mundane criminality. A silent stride carried him across the street during the early morning hours before dawn, clad in ruined steel and shredded cloak.

In a moment he had crossed the street, a swift and burning shadow, whose mailed fist thundered against the front door. As it rattled within the frame, he slammed the portal repeatedly, relentlessly hammering as the material complained, cracked and began to give. With a final groan the door gave way, smashed into loose fragments, allowing him entry over the fallen planks and broken nails.

Crushing the ruin underfoot, he moved swiftly towards the shelves that Uriel had informed him of upon a brief visit with the infamous Barber Hander. Amongst the many vials and flasks he discovered the pair of bottles he sought, each catching the warped fire in his burning gaze, illuminating the liquid contents with ghastly fury. He plucked them as fresh flowers for a lover, carefully clutched between armored fingertips before they were slipped into the pouch on his belt. The frayed, worm-eaten leather creaked beneath his touch.

Such wonders within Myrken Wood, he considered, laying his hand upon the top of the shelf. Such wonders and yet a great fear of magic, despite the new wall that Elspeth had wrought for their sake. The one appointed to redeem him and who so boldly admitted it.

Whatever arrogance had appointed her his supposed nemesis lent his arm greater strength as he hurled the shelf over amidst the soft rain of shattered glass and pooling of noxious chemicals about booted feet. Content with the measured destruction, after crushing another vial underfoot, he turned and strode swiftly from the Apothecary. The cloak fluttered out behind him, a captive burial shroud clinging to an unqiet spirit, while his long shadow loomed obediently across the street.

With each soundless stride he moved with greater speed towards the same shadowy patch beside the Tea House that had served as his gate into Myrkentown. Tonight would be an eventful night.

There was still much work to be done.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

There were no corpses in Myrken Wood.

It was a house like any other, at least any other in this part of Myrkentown. Counted amongst the poorer residents, undoubtedly, Teron stared at the single-story affair, with its patched roof and slightly leaning left wall. It sagged and slouched like an old man, toothless and soured by wind, rain and time. With eyes alight in crimson fire, he considered the dilapidated structure with a wandering curiosity. These impoverished people lacked only in things and yet they, and the wealthy, were equally east to know for what they were.

Wasting no time, he set upon this door as he had at the apothecary a short distance away. The resulting thunder and splintering of aged wood, enfeebled by the elements, undoubtedly echoed down the stirred avenues. After a measured, tireless storm of hammering fists, his mailed hand eventually drove through the door to the chorus of dawning surprise and alarm within. Taking care to act quickly, he rent the door from its frame and cast it aside to the chagrin of recently repaired armor that groaned at the added pressure of such weight.

Within he beheld a trio of young men and an older youth, a pair of women huddling behind them. One of which turned and fled, shrieking, towards the only other room in the ramshackle house as fear cast their prepared, combative countenances into trembling masks tempered with fear. The chilling presence settled about him, transfixing their feet to the floor, flushing blood with lead.

One man fell to his knees, weeping in bitter terror and clawing at his hair in self-abasement to appease the armored nightmare that started towards them. The remaining three, men and woman, sprang upon him with a terrified courage. Two brandished clubs that shuddered against his armor, the other fought with a long, serrated knife that slipped into the dead flesh between gauntlet and bracer.

Teron slid the aged blade from its belt-carried scabbard, the pronged hilt framing a blade forged to slay a man blooded by gods. At the base of the handle rested a small skull whose deathly grimace welcomed the peasants to death's door. He retreated a single step as the knife hit home again, snaring one of the club-wielders by the neck and hurling him against the wall, skewered him a moment later as the young man rebounded from the merciless collision.

With a few swift, deft turns of his weapon, Arak's Ruin became theirs as well. It was a simple thing to murder such as these, barely worth noting in his mind as the weapon found its scabbard once more. Expressionless beneath the scarf that coiled about his grim, ruined features he dragged the bodies together. The one to flee had undoubtedly escaped. The bloodshed would leave testament to what had likely happened. Yet there would be some measure of uncertainty. For he had piled the corpses in the nearest shadow.

He stepped into the same shadow himself and, in a moment, had passed.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

And so it went for the remainder of the evening. Houses scattered across Myrkentown fell victim to the Ashfiend's murderous spree at seemingly random locations. barred doors and shuttered windows did little to placate hammering, armored fists or a blood-blackened blade. Nor did it take long for constables and even a few knights to be mustered as reports spread of ongoing assaults within citizens' very homes.

The hours between midnight and dawn, however, are thankfully limited.

Once dawn began to threaten to bleed out across the night sky, the attacks slowed and soon ceased. A brief but bloody evening for Myrkentown where fear had run rampant, far moreso than the murderous Ashfiend himself. Having put seven families to sword and fist, leaving perhaps twenty missing. For unless someone escaped to tell of the destruction he had wrought, and a few indeed had, then there were no corpses to be found. Shattered chairs, overturned tables, and broken clubs and daggers bespoke of the citizens' courage in defending brothers, mothers and children.

Yet there were no dead.

And Harold's Smithy had been vacated for some time. Uriel had learned of the structure's currently uninhabited state through careful research in the Library of Mudd, and asking a few precise questions of particular individuals. Not that Uriel needed to worry overmuch about suspicion since he was, by trade, a blacksmith himself. His alibi had been a justification of wanting to move into the city but to avoid the dangerous Tannerback Lane, where some dozen or more individuals had been found slain in the streets one dismal afternoon.

Therefore the building welcomed the Ashfiend in silence, with cobweb draperies framing the scattered windows, since boarded over, and nesting in the corners. He moved in silence, as always, despite both heavy, scarred armor and the pair of bodies clutched in bloodied arms. With a patience born of walking for countless years, he crossed the breadth of the entrance and towards a trapdoor in the floor. Tugging it open, he dropped the carcasses down into the creeping darkness that served as little more than a warehouse for the slain.

His simmering gaze illuminated the shadows below, the tangle of pale limbs and blank faces, numbering them with purpose and destiny. A gesture of his foot and the heavy trapdoor tumbled shut with a muffled complaint and creak of rusted chain. He drifted, lost in plans, towards the rear door that led into a shared courtyard with a handful of other buildings. Mailed hands reassured himself that this secondary entrance had been securely barred, these windows boarded as well.

Considering the building as secure as it could be, he strode towards the nearest corner and the shadows that lingered there with the sunlight creeping in between board and window frame. In an instant he had vanished, leaving the sun to rise upon a bloody day. Leaving a pair of flasks upon an old, worm-eaten table.

Leaving with them enough blood in similiar flasks, gathered a short time ago, to fill an adult human.

[Cinnabar]

A bloody night, and one punctuated by the shrill of Constabulary whistles and the clatter of booted feet in the nighttime streets. First a robbery, then an attack, and then more. Uniformed figures patrol the streets warily, crossbows and falchions handy, clustering around the scene of each new attack only to be drawn off by the high piping of whistles from streets away.

Even the Governor has been roused, and runs with his Constables from one place to the next, each time coming across evidence of destruction, of brutal ruin and sprays of blood, but no bodies. Never any bodies. Hurried questioning of those few witnesses who escaped speak of a hulking figure with eyes that burn like hellfire, armoured and unstoppable. Except they need barely even give this description, for all in Myrken know this figure by now. Ashfiend. Appearing from the night's shadows and disappearing as swiftly, leaving behind the shattered evidence of his passage.

Constabulary patrols are increased, armoured officers with punched-brass cylinders at their belts and a fearful look in their eyes. They run from one scene to the next, but arriving always too late to catch a monster who can walk through shadows.

It is some hours before dawn when a Constabulary courier is dispatched for Darkenhold bearing a hastily-penned note, to hammer upon the doors of that fastness until allowed to deliver his message, with orders to await a reply.

To Ariane Emory

Ariane

The Fiend murders his way across the town. At least a dozen are missing, probably dead, taken from their homes. Make ready, for he plots some foulness and will no doubt come for what is his when he requires it.

We have let him be for too long. This must be ended.

C

[Carnath-Emory]

Darkenhold, with its towering, troublesome gates, and stone walls that slightly glitter beneath the meagre moonlight. With its broad grounds, upon which some small scattering of tents still lingers, and this commotion rouses some of their occupants; heads emerge from tent-flaps, some hush of foreign syllables colouring the autumn night.

It's one of these who will answer that initial summons, parting wrought iron sufficiently to permit the courier entry, for the name he mentions is sufficient to admit him. It is the woman herself who'll meet him at those doors, which draw open some moments before he quite reaches them. With dark hair a tumble and sleep rubbed from her eyes; with a coat drawn slipshod over loose garments, and a weapon drawn low at her side. The grey eyes demand an answer, and the courier provides one in the form of three written sentences.

"Tell him it is made secure," she answers almost immediately -- and pauses. Tension about the mouth then, and a hand that rakes back through the tangled hair; a glance is shot towards the dark hall from which she'd emerged, all furious indecision. Far inside, a lantern blooms into bright and golden life. A second, some moments after. A sputtering third, and when she turns to face the courier again, it is with a small, solemn smile; it is with conviction.

"Tell him that it is made secure," she repeats. "That he must send swift word if there is need or news. That we prepare."


It's a considering gaze which follows the courier's departure until he is well past their borders; it is a quiet consultation inside, as well. When she emerges, it is with a sheathed weapon and a leather satchel, and the stables her destination.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Anders Rejnik had been a poor man, with a poor family, who had travelled from New Dauntless to eek out a living upon a small, merciless plot of land. Their fields almsot enjoyed toying with them, or so it seemed, laboring under the age old curses of pagan gods remembered only by the occasional dish of offering left out before the witching hour.

Anders Rejnik laid with the rest of his family, in the far corner of their smoke house. Their were limbs entangled in a grotesque, pallid embrace. What flesh left to them had already begun to dry, the putrid sting of smoke masking a necrotic stench.

Anders Rejnik was dead, along with his family.

A swift kick shattered the dismal silence that had settled into the smoke house as, beneath the Ashfiend's boot, the double doors flew open. Flanked by rotting wood he strode inside, the fresh corpses strangled within a mailed grasp leaving shallow furrows across the earthen floor. The four of them, local youths who enjoyed venturing out into the dangerous Myrken evenings, would live on in sorrow, tears, and romanticized memories for a long time to come. He crosssed the breadth of the room and left them amongst the others. Each countenance gazed up at hm with faces twiste din terror, robbed of courage, and life, by the Ashfiend's chilling aura, fist, and sword.

The edge of his tattered black cloak drifted over and stirred the hay strewn across the floor. He would not need as many this far from Myrkentown, but he would need more. Striding from the smoke house he headed towards the nearest patch of shadows.

The evening's harvest was far from complete.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Released from a mailed hand, the last porcine carcass dangled from the rope strung from one wall to the next, alongside its brethren. Other animals, those who had not broken through the fence and scattered upon his approach, lay just inside the door. For the entrance, then, the remaining bodies of farm animals. For the far corner the growing collection of country folk who no longer cared for the sake of their bodies.

Teron's eyes simmered in the aching darkness, filled with the thick stench of smoke, as he counted the slain first in one pile, and then the other. The pigs swayed gently, their dead flesh bearing the wrathful markings of his prolonged touch, their shadows cast at a flickering slant across the hay-strewn floor. As he crossed towards the slain farming families, his own shadow bled out to consume the lesser ones, crimson eyes alighting upon each open, staring eye.

He raised his armored hands and bent his thoughts towards the broken ones before him. He felt their cold veins in his own flesh, their stale lungs and broken bones. He felt the stiffness in their joints and the potent gravity of death that severed flesh from animation, body from soul. In the simmering fire of his own gaze he forged a new guiding force that began to flow through his stretched arms and gather within palms and fingertips.

His will bent towards dark sorcery, each finger steadily curled, leaving his hands in purposeful fists. Fists with which he now grasped their new lives, such as they were, and jerked the reins to compel their unthinking service. One by one, the assembled slain began to stir.

One by one they began to move.

[Euphemia]

Viveka

It had been a difficult search. With all the activity, and the quarry's means of travel, there was no certain way to find what she sought. This did not discourage; if anything, it made her more determined to succeed. With few trails to follow, she went with the age-old basic plan: scour Myrkentown until she found something, or the absence of it.

It was the faintest of scents that drew her that drew her that morning -- blood, decay, and a certain acrid smell that belonged to the target she chased. There, a Smithy. She continued down the street, only to double back once out of immediate sight, creeping through the thinning shadows. This was it. Certain of it, but how to get proof? There's some hesitation to the soft steps that carry her along the building's front, ducked low beneath any windows. The door; quietly tested.

Barred? Another tactic. Slipping around the building's side, out of casual sight, she reaches up and takes firm hold on one of those boards, planting her foot. Then heave. It's some struggle, but the first rips away with a dull crunch. The next, then. Once the window's clear, she'll loft lithe body across the sill and into the darkened building proper.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Harold's Smithy stood empty, cold and lonely. There was no business to alight its windows, nor owner to make the building appealing to one who might rent it. Behind it a rundown courtyard sprawled from door to door, shared between four; the other three inhabitants little cared for the smithy's state of repair.

An old chair rests beside the window that has just been freed. Cobwebs sprawl across its back and drape like a blanket over one arm. Sunlight sets the gossamer threads aglow, portraying the chair as mummified in snowy pearl. A heavy, wet scent clings to the weathered walls and roof thst aprawls overhead in thick timbers and stout beams.

A broken table rests in one corner. Worn by age or the dares of children many months ago. Her footsteps echo, or threaten to, as if the room were hungry for anything resembling the living to fill itself again. For there were no traces of habitation here. Yet there was something that betrayed a foul purpose.

A stink.

A stench.

The sickly-sweet odor of decay that wafted up from between the floorboards. Beside a long counter, perhaps once used for displays of smithed objects, a swollen trapdoor rests squarely in the floor, identified by how its cut boards run cross-grain tot he floor and the rusted iron ring. The lip about the closed door bears leprous white aftermath, like dried, crusted snow that carries, itself, no scent. Unless one can smell the sensation of being cold, the sensation of freezing to death. An acrid cold that can do little else but maim and blight.

For her intrusion, however, nothing but silence.

[Euphemia]

Concerned with her quiet entry into the empty building, with settling her feet so lightly to the floor that they are scarcely heard, the abominable stench sweeps across her in an almost palpable wave. She staggers, fingers searching blindly in pouches along her belt for a soft cloth to be pressed against her nose, to give her some protection against the horror of it while she recovers. Seems like she's found the right place, then. She scrubs her sleeve against watering eyes, hoping she won't have to burn these clothes later; a quick glance for her surroundings, for those tables, that chair, the utter lack of life that fills this place. Hmm. And here, a trap door leading down into some dark pit beneath the floor.

Satisfied that she might be able to breath without retching, chair is snagged in gloved hands, carried lightly towards the waiting entrance with it's odd, snowy powdering. She really ought to leave, to summon help. There's no doubt that this will lead to nothing good, nothing good at all. So why then, is she braving herself to prod at that alabaster powder? Simple curiosity. Chair is cautiously lowered towards it, but here she pauses. This was nothing but foolishness. Chair settled near her hip, she carefully backs away, doing her best not to disturb the door and the likely trap it contains. 'Trap door', indeed. Back to the window then, to slip past it and drop to the ground outside. She has a member of the Constabulary to find, to lead here to this shop of death and decay.

[Malaroth]

Malaroth scowled at the reports before him. The knights had dutifully expanded their patrols into the reaches of the countryside in light of the Ashfiend's recent escapades for fresh corpses and bloodthirsty murder. He could only assume that the monster was after the corpses given that bodies were never found and the locals had since taken up the habit of burning their dead.

Evidently Myrken Wood had been troubled by necromancers before.

With an elbow propped upon the desk that faced a squat, broad window he ran fingertips along the lines between his blond eyebrows. He sighed. He stared at the sheafs of paper for several moments attempting to resign himself to what he could possibly do to help fight this latest menace.

Both reports documented more missing persons and evidence of violent struggles in both the south west and south east corners of the land. The directions proved significant as they began to cast a light upon the shadow of the Ashfiend's plans. People had gone missing in the four corners of the land and in Myrkentown itself. The borders and the center of the land were accounted for. Though these were not warriors that the necromancer had raised they were yet, undoubtedly and unfortunately, fresh. Empowered by sorcery and their master's hateful will, the creatures would need to be hacked into pieces, one by one.

Such deeds required risking lives. Too many lives had been risked on the Ashfiend's behalf as of late. With a mild sigh he set the missives aside and ran his pale fingertips along the curve between neck and shoulders. Beneath the touch tension bled between his pores and coursed along the length of his arms, trembling in memory of brutalized Zachea and the helpless civillians who huddled in the center of Sidgar.

"Forgive me, your Majesty," he muttered while climbing to his feet. "But you took my oath of allegiance to be a knight, not a clerk."

He crossed briskly to the door to his chambers and, leaning outside, cleared his throat to get the guard's attention.

"Ready my horse. And twenty knights."

[Cinnabar]

Alerted by the hunter Viveka, not long passes before a squad of Constables makes its way to the boarded-up shell of Harold's Smithy, down the alleyway into the courtyard behind the vacant building; a half-dozen of them, heavy-armoured as has become customary since the resurgence in violence from the Fiend, with mailshirts and steel pauldrons offering what protection they can.

Various tools are brought with them also - a couple of iron crowbars, with which the boards nailed across the back door are briskly pried free; on finding the door blocked from the inside, another implement is brought into play - a stout piece of heavy oak perhaps four feet long, iron-shod at one end, with iron handles along its length. Slung between two of the burlier Constables present, this ram is applied to the door with vigour, the men building up a pounding rhythm fit to splinter wood and burst locks. Failing that, one of the others carries a long-handled wood axe. Subtlety is not a particular consideration here, it would seem.

The remaining four wait nearby, a couple of them wrinkling their noses at the faint smell of rot that seeps from the building's boarded windows, adjusting the camphor-soaked kerchiefs draped about their necks; it would seem that the information the tracker had provided is correct, insofar as there's certainly something dead in there.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Teron scowled beneath the loose grey scarf that coiled about the lower half of his horrific visage and tumbled about his collarbone. Though one search party had been lain to waste, he had felt his assassin's destruction, and some trouble where he had first begun to store them within Myrken Wood. For once, the land seemed plagued only by him, or he had made enough noise to warrant the full, focused attention of the backwater land. In either case, much was at risk, particularly in Myrkentown. Much that he could no longer afford to risk.

A single thought arose from his mind, reaching out to the slain left buried in the arms of their country folk. Even as he stepped into the nearest patch of shadows, with Uriel looking on in deadly wonder, and began to vanish, his command reached out across the expanse of Myrken Wood to all the cells of the slain.

Arise.

An instant later he stepped from the beshadowed corner of the abandoned smithy. His swift, silent tread allowed him to snatch up the flasks of blood and slip them, securely, into the pouch on his aged belt. Every step fell, and each finger curled, to the building explosion of the constables who struggled to batter their way inside. Unaware of who had arrived, though with the flasks momentarily safe, he slowly plucked Arak's Ruin from its scabbard.

To his side a trapdoor began to shudder within the floor as wasting fingertips peaked out from beneath the side. The wood swelled beneath the endless hammering, threatening to buckle even as the front door gave way to a pack of waiting Constables, undoubtedly expecting the worst.

All across Myrken Wood the dead shuddered and twisted in spasms of false life. Their eyes stirred with the distant sparks of the Ashfiend's hate, their limbs moved beneath the pressing onslaught of his indomitable will, their hearts' ruin hungered for bloodshed and death. As one they arose from smoke houses and wells.

As one they heard their master's call.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The hordes crawled through the darkness from their holes in barns, basements and smoke houses. As one they tore at their own corrupted flesh with the memory of self-loathing stirred with every creaking joint and muscle pulled taut while attempting to shrug off the stiffening of their fleshly tombs. One by one their eyes sparked and stirred, welcoming a distant, hateful flame into their depths that gleamed with perverse hope, like stars brought to earth, lashed into their horrid faces. Their own shadows arose from the ground to clothe their iniquity, unliving masks of the same sort that nestled about their master's infernal gaze now reflected a hundred fold for all of Myrken to behold for their passing did not go unmarked.

Abroad in the darkness families huddled in fear, praying to their gods, to the light, to whatever might save them. Doors shut, windows boarded, fathers clutching daughters, mothers clinging to sons bore silent witness to the hundred-strong plague that passed them by. Their wake left a greater silence, the tenuous hope of immediately answered prayer, until conscience pricked and brought a single question - whence, then, were they headed?

As the horde neared its destination, drawn from the corners of Myrken, their master emerged from the shadow of a perishing elm. He spared the lone sentinel a withering glance of simmering eyes sheathed in hooded shadow while a mailed hand fell to rest upon Arak's Ruin. With every silent step his thoughts turned from the abortive attack upon the Broken Dagger, and his enemies there, to the current foe. A foe hidden behind tall, stout wooden walls. A foe who had proven as implacable as the constables and whose hand threatened to catch up just in time to bring a ruin to carefully laid plans.

He strode from the shadows just as cries of alarm, shouts for the men beyond the walls to prepare for battle, to sound for battle, to stir to defend their chapter house from the surging pack of the slavering undead. Undaunted, Teron began his silent trek towards the outer wall's main gates. The length of his tattered black cloak flared behind him in vengeful promise as his gaze caught, briefly, the banner flown even in darkness from the keep's highest tower.

It was the banner of the Shepherd Knights.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

In the presence of their master, they felt his hate pulsing through them with a sickly pulse. It set their burning eyes to flicker as if stirred by a spectral wind and set their coarse mouths into twisted, hungry grimaces. Their fingertips had been worried off by teeth and coarse stone, worn to the very bone beneath. Born along with unholy strength and tireless furor, they quickly closed the distance to the chapter house's outer wall and began hurling themselves onto it.

Teron turned his gaze heavenward and uncurled his armored fingers. He felt the cold steel of his ancient, scorched tomb pressing against his pallid, bloodless palms and the swelling of his hateful will within his unbeating chest. The swirling vortex of hateful fire, leashed to the center of his rotting soul, filled his insidious eyes with the vision of a broken, burning chapter house.

"Pray until you are numb..." his voice echoed across the suddenly embattled keep. The syllables crawled and rumbled from the depths of an unearthly tomb, buried beneath ancient armor and festering rage, echoing on into the surrounding darkness.

His fingers began to tighten, tips drawing towards metal-plated palms. The balefire began to fill him, fueling him beyond the relentless fury that empowered his fists and aged sword. The terrible length of his shadow uncoiled in a grim banner while the clouds, overhead, began to churn and writhe upon and about themselves. Sparks fluttered down in the darkness in scattered, orange rain. Where they struck the fiend's armor, they hissed against the chill that writhed, always, about him - a tame, leeching plague.

"I will collapse you like weeds," he threatened, he promised, the words vowing destruction for the knights within.

Overhead the clouds peeled away from the epicenter of a swirling, hungry storm. At once the fields around him fell beneath a sudden blight, collapsing in manifest death as, centered in the storm, an enormous burning fist and arm, wreathed in flame, blossomed into the night sky. The length of the arm was lost beyond the clouds though the searing fire sparkled and writhed in the contours of an armored hand.