The Seed of Madness

[Teron_Ashfiend]

It had been a difficult affair to seize the waitress from the Broken Dagger. At first only the elven swordsman had moved to oppose him. Yet Teron's presence had drawn opponents from the very woodwork itself to set themselves against him. The elf witch had soon joined those ranks, followed by some gypsy woman and finally the hulking werewolf. The ragtag band of would-be heroes had fought, tooth-and-nail, and had significantly delayed him. Had the woman fled the inn entirely she might have escaped.

Yet the Ashfiend had won through.

It was his nature to relentlessly press onward, at times as slow as fall descending into winter but just as unstoppable. Untiring, unyielding, he had battered his way through heavy opposition and won out - the girl belonged to him now. But not without cost.

The shadows darkened in the corner of the sanctuary. Within their depths a pair of crimson eyes flickered into being, livid lamps that drew in what little light remained, before the tall, armored figure took shape. His form was darker than the shadows that sloughed from broad shoulders beneath blackened plate as he emerged into the chamber. After a moment longer, perhaps to enjoy their mortal passenger, the shadows retreated from Teddi as well.

With only the few steps he has taken from the woman, the chill hovering about him had somewhat abated. Every gesture causes ice to spill from the gaps in his ancient suit of blackened metal plate. The crystallized water cascades to the floor like muted diamond castanets and, his left hand torn bare to reveal scourged translucent flesh and the hint of bone beneath, Ashfiend turns to regard Teddi over his shoulder. An elongated metallic hiss announced his sword being sheathed once more.

The pair stood in a sanctuary. What pews that remain are rotten, overturned and collapsed. The floor itself, where it did not entertain shallow but broad puddles of stagnant water, bore the great black stains of some conflagration that sought to consume the entire structure. An altar to the One Faith squatted at the far end, not far from a gaping hole in the ceiling that opened to a clouded midnight sky.

For a moment he stood in the heavy, cold silence. The air here was indeed colder than what one might expect for a summer's eve and Ashfiend could not take credit for it. He studied his torn hand, flexed it into a fist and, lowering it to his side, turned to face her fully.

"Follow." It was a simple, icy command. The heavy, gravelly rumble has grown hollow so far removed from the threat of his opponents. Empty to the degree that it was as if the four erstwhile patrons had not, mere moments ago, wrought havoc upon him.

[Teddi]

The terrified, half-shod barmaid stood in the corner of the sanctuary when the large, scorch-armoured figure moved further into the room; tendrils of shadow briefly clung to her, sapping the warmth from her, before they reluctantly rejoined the main body of their keeper, Teron Ashfiend. Teddi tried desperately to touch her cross, but she'd lost her necklace back in her room at the Broken Dagger. She was disoriented, trying to understand how they came to this place. Where was the fighting elf? Where were the others?

A frightened stare took in the ruined church room, and this only heightened her anxiety. Every breath was on the verge of an outright sob, quick and panicked, and she visibly cringed back against the wall when the cauldrons of Ashfiend's eyes turned on her. She did not think about whether it was the cold or the fear that made her tremble so much; she thought about nothing but how her life seemed to dwindle before her eyes, the closer she was to this thing.

The wounded black shadow beckoned her, no evidence of anything but cold in his voice. Teddi did not wonder if she was going to die; she knew that she was going to die. There was no doubt in her mind, and she had to take chances while she had them.

"Follow."

The pale-haired girl stared at him over the distance, shaking hands gripping handfuls of her dirty apron; her young face was empty of colour, eyes nearly drowned, fat tears crawling down her cheeks. Breaths could barely squeeze down her throat, perhaps because her heart had lunged up into it and gotten stuck there.

She ran. It was surprising to Teddi that her legs were so complying, that they did not fold beneath her and give her to this wet and blackened floor the instant that she tried. She bolted along the wall itself, the ankle length of her dress tangling about her skinny legs; she stumbled over an overturned pew, lashed through one of the sanctuary's stagnant puddles, desperately wanting to be away from him.

"H- Help me! Please, someone help me! Someone - someone help!" Teddi screamed over and over, her voice breaking. She did not know where they were, but someone had to be out there somewhere. "Help me!"

Blinded by scorching tears, she did not look backward; she tried to find a way out, a broken window, a door, anything available to her. More than anything, though, she ran through these obstacles of ruined faith, her long rope of braid swinging behind her - six inches of her dress hem soaked with old water.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

She ran. The woman, still possessing some strength despite the harrowing journey so far, had found the will to flee. In dread silence he let her go, watching her reservoirs of strength fade until she fell into hysterics. The aged double doors, worn by worm and weather, yielded beneath her nearly blind flailing.

For his part, Teron turned and strode back towards the corner from which they had emerged. The ruined hand curled painfully at his side, cradled against an armored hip, and tiny crushed motes of ice drifted from the joints in his scarred plate armor. Once again the shadows heeded his call. Once again they bore their master to his destination.

Outside, the chapel rests beside a larger building. An old dormitory for the monks who once dwelt here. Gray cliffs arose to cradle the priory from the stronger, colder winds that eventually swept down into the heart of Myrken Wood. Save for the spectral voices born on the breeze no one else remained to greet the serving girl.

Except one tiny figure little more than three feet tall. She stood in a filthy, heavy wool skirt and faded, mud-marked blouse. The matted tangles of her brown hair lay, mostly, confined by a simple leather strand. Her back to Teddi, the girl's unseen gaze evidently sought out something that lay in the plains, in a southerly direction.

Teddi's shrieks are finally answered by another. By the girl, as unsteady upon her left leg, she turns about to reveal a small, pale face caked with dirt behind which peer a pair of cold blue eyes. She took one step forward, and a halting second, raising both thin arms as if to embrace her.

Only, by raising her arms, she revealed something else. At her sides lay two deep, bloodless wounds. With a ragged, forced breath she took a third step and hesitantly hissed. "Cannot... escape..."

[Teddi]

It was a pure miracle, she thought, that the doors banged open at her flailing insistence. The cold, haunted air tried to freeze her lungs as she bolted outside, and she stopped short as the small, wool-clad thing turned to her and raised its arms. Teddi's hands clutched to her chest, and she recoiled from the unnatural thing.

"Where am I?!" she begged the awful thing, feeling sick as she saw the gaping wounds. It slowly stepped toward her, reaching out for her, and Teddi did not even wait for a reply. The girl screamed incoherently for it to get away from her before dashing toward the old and larger dormitory.

Her thin body struck the doors, and she pounded her fists against them, sobbing uncontrollably; her hands dropped to the latch, and she rattled it, pushing and pulling, before looking behind her with dread-filled eyes, still overflowing with tears.

"Stay away from me!" the girl shrieked. "Please stay away from me!"

If the thing continued toward her, she would fumble free the dainty and simple coinpurse hanging from her dress' cotton belt, flinging it at the horrific dead-girl. This nightmare place was unfathomable to her; its very intentions were beyond the present scope of her imagination.

"It's all I have! It's all I have! Please, it's all I have!" She screamed, trying to force her way through the doors.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

These doors yield as well, welcoming the terrified Teddi into a dark, shadowy embrace. Of their own accord, perhaps sympathetic, the doors begin to close behind her passage in a small attempt to cradle - or consume - her. Within, with neither a hole in the ceiling nor a light to see by, all remains as darkness. The scuffling feet undoubtedly echo to fill the void between her and whatever else shares the dark.

For several moments all is silence. Then, however, there is movement. A brief shuffling of heavy, unsure feet - but is it her own? Is it another's? Or is it a construct of her own fear, perhaps, given some form resembling the horrors beyond the doors?

The shuffling pauses, as if teasing, and then echoes again accompanied by a dry, breathless gurgle. A gentle breeze stirs, a slow exhalation as if the structure itself were breathing or sighing. There is the scurry of dry, scratching claws overhead - on the ceiling? Some quickly-climbing monstrosity in the total blackness? some thing on the floor above?

Outside, as Teron emerged from a shadowed corner beside the ruined chapel, his sinister gaze swept over the abandoned coin purse, the shuffling girl, and the closing doors of the dormitory building. A mangled hand reached up to draw the gold-hemmed hood away from pallid, translucent flesh drawn unnaturally taut over angular features. The shadows remained, however, about the livid crimson gaze and a smile crept its way over the hidden remnants of his lips at his good fortune.

The woman was doing all of the work for him.

[Teddi]

The heavy doors closed behind her, plunging her into unexpected darkness; all she could focus on, at first, was her own shrill, desperate breathing - but when she heard the noise of footsteps, she clapped a shaking hand over her mouth. Her wide, shining wet eyes stared into shadows so deep that they could not quite adjust.

Her hand slid down to her own, pale throat, and she hoarsely called out.

"Hello?! Hello, is anyone here? M- My name is Teddi, and -- "

She cut off abruptly, overwhelmed by faintness; only a few paces into the room, away from the shut doors, she weakly sank to her knees in a pool of dark, blue skirts. The barmaid was so frightened and paranoid that she could feel eyes in the darkness, even if there was none. Her crying eyes sank into the embrace of her white hands, shoulders trembling.

" .. and I'm s- so frightened," she whispered at last, her voice little more than a broken whimper. With her back curled to the doors in silence afterward, she tried to listen to the sounds within the structure in the darkness. She began to feel like she was all alone in this place, alone with Him and perhaps other ones like the broken girl out in the howling cold.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The girl's fear was sweet. He could feel it through the necklace of 5-pointed onyx pieces that he had plucked from his pouch a moment ago and just donned. As Teron slowly crossed to stand just outside the double doors, and dismissed the girl-sentry with a wave of his hand, he considered that this episode might be worth milking. Soon, however, he needed to place her within a cell so that he could go about the minor tasks that needed accomplishing.

He missed, inasmuch as he could miss anything, the dead kingdom of Xar-Dhuum and the castle of Caer Gardraark. A number of servants to do his bidding, to leave him free to see to the greater management of his plans. Soon, he considered, his losses would be recovered. But first things first.

Inside, Teron noted as the necklace worked its own magic, the girl would begin to hear the scuttling of feet. He could hear it as well, could perceive the seeds of her own madness begin to spill over and fuel the dire necklace and its fell purpose. Dry, nailed feet that scraped and whispered, stopping occasionally before carrying on. First at one corner of the dark room, and then another. But they crept ever-closer.

Among the intermittent scuffling, there would sound a whisper. A soft exhalation that might part the lips of a dying man. A chill about the room, after several moments, creeping over the floor, across her toes and along the back of her neck. And again. As if someone had crawled closer and whose breath now tickled her skin. It paused, holding still in the tintillating silence that suddenly devoured the unseen chamber.

"Teddi," came the whisper from just behind her. A second and third time as the scuttling feet scraped over the stone and wooden floor in the darkness.

"Teddi," it was echoed in some far corner of the darkness. And a third time from above her... a fourth time from below.

[Teddi]

No one answered her - or at least not in any natural way.

Her legs felt as boneless as ectoplasm as she hunched on the floor, holding herself; her tear-blurred eyes stared intensely toward the first noise of whisper-hissing steps, trying to penetrate the thick darkness without success.

"Is someone there?" the girl whispered softly, palsied hands digging into her thin biceps.

She turned her head another way at the sound of her name, but it wasn't a voice or a tone that she recognised. The only thing that she recognised was what the voice inspired, whether or not she imagined the undertone of threat. All Teddi could feel was spine-crawling fear, and each moment that the voice relocated itself - the fear grew.

Teddi, whispered the shadows above her, from the corners - and she let out a mewling cry, scrambling backward on her hands until her spine pushed against the door. The girl blindly groped upward and backward for the latch, heart beating wildly.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The old, coarse wood flaked beneath her hands and fluttered about her shoulders in dry, dessicated rain. As her fingers fumbled with the latch, the doors shifted within their frame. It was her weight, along with some unseen force, that pulled the door open.

Silhouetted against a sky decorated with grim burial shroud clouds, overly stretched to poorly fill the night, loomed a figure clad in shining, polished plate armor. A long-bladed sword hung at his side, the dark hilt plain and straight, and a great black cloak fluttered about him in the cool evening breeze. The stranger, his features mildly kissed by the sun, had been shaped into bold, strong proportions set afire by piercing, ice-blue eyes set beneath a noble brow.

He stared at her a moment, the crack of a smile revealing even teeth and a flash of ivory-white. A quick jerk of his head, peering behind himself and out into the evening from which Teddi had sought shelter, tosses the long blond hair about a strong, chiseled jaw.

"At last," he began in an even, sonorous voice as he attempted to push against the door and into the large, spacious chamber. "I've found you. Follow me, little one. I am here to save you from the fiend." He spared another brief glance over a broad shoulder before regarding her once more.

"We don't have a lot of time."

[Teddi]

The stranger was a light in the darkness, a hero delivered by God himself.

The maid's frightened eyes stared up at the metal-clad man that pushed his way inside with the hazy illumination, battling away the nearest shadows that crowded the whispering room; she almost resisted letting him inside, but it was the clear sound of his voice that decided for her. She'd run out of options long before now.

"Oh, thank the stars!" she sobbed and shakily struggled to her feet, trying to grip her cross for strength, only to find that her necklace was absent. The knot of her empty fist pressed over her heart instead. She thought instantly that he must be a constable, such was her faith in Myrken Wood's force of law; her mind was so hazy with emotion that it did not occur to her that it made little sense for her to be found so quickly, considering the manner of Teron's escape into thin-air.

"You know the way out?" the girl whispered to him, hanging close by his side as he entered.

[Teron_Ashfiend]

"I do," He offered quietly, sparing a glance at the door behind him as it eased shut. "I do indeed. We must, however, move with all silence as is possible."

He paused for a moment, possibly letting his eyes adjust to the great darkness that lingered in the chamber that, from darkened corners and soaring rafters, whispered and echoed the girl's name. "That means," he continued, "that no matter what horrors we face you must be brave. As you have already to have survived your encounter with Teron."

He started off then, his cloak fluttering behind him and despite the weight of his armor he moved with a practiced grace and quiet step. One hand remained near to the weapon at his side, the other empty and open. "To escape we must press further inside, and up a flight of stairs. Do not be afraid, I will direct you aright."

The shadows lingered and pressed about them though, with shuddering and silent protest that shied away from the joined pair. Whatever simple bond shared between them, in mutual fear and hope, posed an evident curse and disgust for them. The rooms they moved through, barely illuminated by the long, slender, windows illuminated several long tables, as in a mess hall, many of which bore the remnants of old flame and more recent rot. Beyond these a broad stair that ascended into tighter confines of simple, straight corridors marked by stout, simple doors.

Pausing before one such door that bore a small iron grate at an adult's eye-level, perhaps half-way or so down the corridor, the armored figure halted. Blond strands settled about mildly tanned features as he attempted to pierce the shadows about them through narrowed eyes. A grated window at the end of the corridor shone as a strange beacon, illuminated by clear starlight that bled an alien blue down the length of the hall.

"Inside the room girl," he murmured quietly. "Quickly. I do not trust this place and I fear Teron's shadowy servants may be following us."

[Teddi]

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Weeks later...

It had been a trap.

As Teddi's small, crumpled form lies in the low bed with the old headboard in a small, cramped room, it occurs to her, for the hundredth time, that it had been a trap.

He'd lured her to this room under the guise of a constable or a knight, making her believe that she was to be rescued; in the end, he locked her away, but not without coming to an understanding, first.

Shaking fingers touch the large dark bruises on her small, frail neck. She understands very little, but there is an understanding: an understanding that there is to be hurt, a great deal of hurt. It's the kind of hurt that one does not recover from easily, or at all.

The barmaid climbs gingerly out of her bed and folds to her knees. Teddi's trembling hands clasp together in front of her face, and she prays very softly, while weeping, for her life.