Foggy Bottom Burns..

[Teron_Ashfiend]

Following the short contest of wills between he and the stowaway Khalika Quiller, a contest that put their memories into conflict like swords and shields, each clash sending up sparks of agony and rage. And in that joint rage, directed by the leashed fury that simmered at his unholy core, the Ashfiend had worked his magic.

The centuries of bloodshed and horror spread from him, born upon a fell and sorcerous wind, through the township of Foggy Bottom that rested near the basin of a tumbling waterfall. The memories whispered and taunted, infecting citizens in a rampant malady of mind and soul that stirred them from slumber with piercing shrieks and stoked madness. A madness born from the Ashfiend himself, his spell offering a glimpse into a shattered mind draped with cobwebs and darkened in innocent blood.

He clutched his sword in an armored fist, his other free due to Bloodmoon's magical disarmament earlier at the Snowstill Priory. When the others rode forth he had been prepared. When they bested his undead servants he was ready, and even in the fleeing he had not strayed overmuch from his plan. Alas, his murderous rampage served to both bolster his forces and draw the attention of the many powerful men and women who, for some mysterious reason, called Myrken Wood home. He had sought to end them all during the battle at Snowstill but the chance had not presented itself.

Yet while they mourned and recovered and talked, he pressed on, tireless and relentless. hatred never spent but ever enduring, even through battle and Savoy's torturous magic, even through Burnie and Quiller's calling to him through a mortal, forgotten name.

Penroll...

It echoed in his thoughts, as it did the citizens,w ho scrambled forth from their homes howling the sudden weight of thousands of years of anguish and impotent rage. Many fell to their knees and clawed at their flesh as if to escape from the prison of corrupt, dead flesh. others fell upon wives and brothers, husbands and daughters, lamenting their deaths even as they strangled them upon the streets.

Fires sparked in open windows that belched smoke into a darkening sky. Heated smoke and ash hissed into frost-bitten dust as it descended upon his blackened pauldroons and raked over his weary armor. Through the madness he stalked, a relentless winter wind, mowing down the occasional interloper with a swift thrust of a sword or backhand of a mailed hand. His silent tread carried the towering figure, clad in ruined, blackened plate, through the town's main streets and towards the waterfall that lay just beyond. The roars of the maddened citizens joined the crushing, brisk splash of the echoing waterfall - one singing nature's song and the other screaming an unnatural lament.

It would not last but three days, he considered, watching a young woman tear out another's throat with her bare teeth and bludgeoning the helpless victim with a broken wagon wheel, crying out for the victim, this "Vraal," to release her at once.

No, the madness would not last. But it would conceal his true purpose for coming. A purpose buried, and largely erased from, the books he had perused at the Library of Mudd. Books and treatises speaking of an ancient mine buried behind the falls that dated back to a time when Myrken Wood was not. A mine that produced a legendary weapon lost to myth and time, that yet clung to the wilted rose pattern all but obliterated upon his scarred breastplate.

A weapon and a promise, he considered, and both that might be used to bring about his doom. And if a few hundred citizens needed to see their doom to ensure that they knew nothing of what he might take from the forgotten mine then so be it.

[ShadowRose]

Elsewhere...

"Foggy Bottom burns, Mother." came the whisper.

The resplendence of her violet lips curled into a slight, contemplative smile. At length, she said; "Find out why. This Ashfiend is a methodical creature. The town of Foggy Bottom burns for a reason, my childe. Find that reason."

"Yes, my Lady Reverence." he said, bowed and left the room.

Magdelaena Valteri chuckled lightly while pressing a black rose against her face, reveling in its scent. "Oh my dear Ashfiend. What could you be up to.."

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The fires, scattered and few, providentially arose to flank the winding column he drove through towards the center of the town and beyond. He paused a moment beside a huddled mass of filthy peasants whose fingernails, caked with their own blood, raked in self-centered spite across their own temples and chests as if trying to dig out some awful, burrowing worm. The worm of undeath that crawled through veins and flesh, leaving them wasted and cold, until it settled into the heart. It left one a puppet to one's ghost, tormented and impotent.

There was no escape.

His thoughts trembled upon a delicate balance as the mad screamed and cursed themselves and their imagined fates, each wearing a soul-fitting mask of the Ashfiend himself, each locked in a desperate struggle against the anguished, stale tides of thousands of years of slavery and slaughter. All bordered by the pale arms of a dead woman, laying in his arms.

Though he left ash and ruin behind him, it also chased him, laired in his shadow that both welcomed and promised him the unyielding cage he had born for countless years. Another pitiful villager, silent in his agony, fell beneath Teron's blade as he approached the town's outskirts, nearing the base of the rushing waterfall.

With every step that threatened to drag him into black despair he also felt the stirring of anger deep within his core, a flutter of false life, a mimicry of true breath and blood. Yet it stirred and pulsed through him all the same, a molten and running fire, that turned his thoughts to ruined Myrken Wood, a butchered Vraal, and a painful death for all who had declared themselves his enemies. It curled his free, mailed hand and sped his silent tread with the always-denied yet ever-renewed hope of peace in the final and exhaustive venting of his fury.

Yet there was no end to madness and hatred. For every enemy that fell beneath his blade Vraal's curse remained. As the water dashed about him, with his approaching the falls, it drenched the ruin of his tattered cloak and plastered it against his broadly armored back. The drenched gray scarf about his lifeless features lay painted with crimson sliver-stains that bespoke the remnants of flesh and life bestowed by Savoy that had since sloughed away in agony.

Alastir had earned a special enmity in his cold, black heart.

Beyond the waterfall, sheltered beneath the downpour, he discovered the stones that barred his passage further. At once he sheathed his blade and, digging in armored fingers that scraped against the stubborn rocks, he began to pry them out one by one.

It would not be long now, he considered, allowing another stone to tumble and bounce down the sloped rock-face. It would not be long now.

[ShadowRose]

Mother's children were stationed near by, awaiting the word to move forward and further investigate this Ashfiend and the burning village he had left behind. And when the orders finally came, a flurry movement headed toward the unfortunate village of Foggy Bottom...

A group of five entities arrived soon after, glancing to and past the destruction as if they had seen it all so many times before this. Unconcerned and uncaring, even as the dying reached out for them, the five shadow-clad entities slipped into the dark, and waited.. waited for the Ashfiend to emerge. He still lingered, they knew.

They could still smell him...

[Sadism]

Through street after street of carnage he patrolled, a ghastly figure amidst the devastation left in the Ashfiend's wake. Matte-black leather shunned the light that bathed him as he passed by the fires that still burned, the plethora of buckles that held the multitude of straps tight about him glimmering like beacons of hope. Glittered in much the fashion the wickedly curved blades that spawned at his wrist and arched back to his elbows did. Beacons of the bleakest sort of hope, and perhaps in this town, a source of mercy if one could call what he brought merciful.

They came, those that still yet lived, those survivors of the madness that may just have managed to avoid death. Came begging for help, pleading for mercy at the angel they saw before them, dark though he was. Eyes drunk with madness saw only the limbs sprouting from his back, and not their condition. They did not heed the ruined flesh, the torn and blood-dripping gibblets that remained amidst the visible bones and tendons.

They came, and he smiled, arms wide to welcome them all to his embrace, to worship him and to please him as was his due. And pleasure he did receive from them, dancing amongst them as a whirling dervish of torment and pain. Let this too be attached to the Ashfiend's name, seen as nothing more than more of the monster's handiwork.

There was no mercy in this angel's embrace, they learned soon enough. There was only more torment, more torture. More pain and madness. It was only when the body could support life no more were they discarded. And always a new plaything was at hand.

"Oh, you and I could have so much fun, Ashfiend. They die so deliciously!"

[Teron_Ashfiend]

The rocks scraped carelessly against his mailed hands, gouging across old, hammered metal and working to loosen the steel coiled about ancient, tearing fingers that yet pulled apart the aged avalanche-ruin before him. Water cascaded just behind him, spraying over a towering figure, kissing armored shoulders, and settling into the sopping ruin of a tattered black cloak. Already some of the drops froze upon him, rendering his cloak stiff and his shoulders slower to respond to the furious, silent commands to his own limbs.

A great heave and a small boulder rolls aside. Tireless he works on, hate and time granting him a hot patience, even as smaller rocks and dust threaten to choke out the progress he has made. Eventually the hole is buttressed by itself, and remains, a gaping hole into a cavern that had not seen light in nearly a decade. On hands and knees he crawls through, forcing the hole to give way further beneath the breadth of his armored form. The trailing cloak snags and tears even further, his sheathed sword clattering madly against damp rocks.

Beyond is the remnant of a mine whose side passages had largely been subject to far older cave-ins. Forgotten to Myrken history, born before Trae Kelsa, save to one of his servants. A servant who remained at the far end of the narrow, vaulted corridor that reminded him of the burrow of an enormous serpent.

"Valinor," came the hollow rumble of the Ashfiend's voice, the working of his jaw sloughing away the last of Alastir's cursed magical regeneration, washing it down beneath his armor to the ruined body beneath. A few droplets of scarlet escaped through the gaps worn into a gauntleted hand.

At the command the figure stirred, a tall figure of impossible thin-ness, emaciated and yet never hungry. Garbed in a black, hooded cloak and carrying a single blade at its side, it arose from the floor at first a shapeless puddle but now resembling that of a tall man caught up in a ponderous, fire-blackened chain that creaked and rattled the reminder of treachery to the Ashfiend ten years ago.

Valinor merely stood, still and silent, beside a small heap of stones as if erected over a slender barrow for a diminutive king. Seeing the creature brought a host of memories to Teron as he approached, memories of war and butchery, enemies and those who foolishly called themselves friends. Memories of those who had sought out his very heart to exert control over him, and of monstrous, abyssal creatures that tricked him into service with the promise of what he desired. It was an old and tired dance.

Leaving Valinor to his own thoughts, dusted by a decade's time, he fell to an armored knee and quickly removed the rubble his servant had carefully arranged here in a dark hole amongst a forsaken backwater territory. Scraping gauntlets pried loose small stones in a rising cloud of dust, revealing, at last, life and death.

Death in the sword, simple and unadorned, save for a diamond set in the center of the hilt. The long blade, a weapon fit only for two-handed use, had been stained black with the blood of fallen enemies. The only weapon of note, according to the test of time, to have ever been forged from these paltry mines. An ancient weapon that had graced his hands when sweat still stained his palms and a pulse quivered his flesh. A once-holy weapon that had ended demons and slaughtered men and elves.

"Deliverance," he murmured in a hollow voice, plucking the weapon from its tomb and carefully laying it across his back.

Life in the small, silver urn whose smooth surface had been traced with nothing but a name. The cold metal held even colder ashes, dimmed by the tide of time, loving scraped within and flavored with the last tears he had ever cried. Clutching the urn securely in his free hand he whispered, "Elysia."

He turned then, making his way for the entrance to the forsaken mine. Behind him Valinor stirred and, in the presence of its master, the bound wraith followed with the metallic clatter of its great, old chain. The long cloak that his its features from view bore the hollow marks of rot and worm, the boots cracked and peeling, and the worn bands of armor all but spent. Yet the chain bound the creature to service, and Ashfiend's will compelled the spirit forward in the guise of a man.

One had entered the cavern and two emerged from out behind the waterfall into the sky illuminated by stirred ash and smoke. The town's damages, he knew, would prove to not be quite so severe as he first thought. Many had died, and in the minds of mortals it would be too many. Yet the fires already began to burn themselves out, and most of the injuries had been self-inflicted and were certainly not lethal. They were the kind of wounds that mutely marked sorrow when no voice could form around the sheer, biting agony. A spiritual and emotional bleeding with one's own hands as leeches.

A hundred, perhaps two, would have met death when the magic had spent itself in another day. Homes had been lost, but no structures of great consequence. Homes could be rebuilt. The magic had done its work all the same. They would remember him, for in the duration of the magic madness he would loom first and foremost in their thoughts and waking nightmares. They would know nothing of where he went, or why, nor what and whom he had taken with him.

He resumes his march out of the town, Valinor at his side, burning eyes lost in thoughts and plans for the future. He had lost his lair and forces, things he had expected to lose, but they remained losses all the same. There remained the question of where and how. Questions he would seek answers to once he had left the confines of Foggy Bottom.

[Khalika]

The cloaked Gypsy had also made her way towards the devastation of Foggy Bottom, it was sometime after Ashfiend evoked his pain upon the unknown victims. Yes it was his pain and they still cried out the memories and agony that was placed within their mind. Strangely enough she didn't pitty the poor souls of Foggy Bottom, she had trouble registering any emotion, though she felt a profound ache for the pain that caused their present torment. She too holds those memories as they are straped and tied away with her own personal horrors.

Stalking through the devastation, she does her best to avoid those who call out, who scream a name that is not her....

"Elysia.."

They cry as they claw and bite, eachother, themselves.. There are signs of Teron Ashfiend passage through, some obvious, some not so. She gathers a sense at his direction, but does not follow suit. No she was in no shape to face him again. Begin caught in his transportation through the shadows, then the meeting of the minds they had, she was less then fit. No brains...not Brawn... will find her what she needed...

Looking about the town, she had little bearing. She had been through this township more then once, but never had regular business here. So only a few landmarks were recognizable and she doubted what she needed could be found in the pub.

She started a base door to door search, slipping in...slipping out. Most were homes, most were empty....A few were not, bodies did not bother her so much...It was the talkers that twixed her spine. Mad jibbering, and twitching, and moaning..it reminded her too much of the Pearl...She never liked thinking about that one.

It was in one house where she found one of these. A young girl in her higher teens, crouched in a corner, pulling her hair out....her low moan....

"Why....Why.....Why....Over and over and over again....

The Gypsy moved towards her, a quick steps as she grabs her shoulder. Trying to shake her back to some sort of awareness. To no avail, still she moaned that word in infuriating repetition, and unfortunately the Gypsy did not have time to wait....

She grabbed the girl's head finger moving to the back of the girls head, the thumbs pressing upon the temples. The girl fought, but the gypsy was stronger, and soon the pressing of the pressure points had the girls form calm, and relaxed. the thumbs rotating upon the temples. It is used by the vertex for bring on a forced meditative state, in the last stages of the races right of passage. In combination with a low mix of words she learned from a hypnotis she traveled with years back, it has become a method of interigation, used when she does not want to leave evidence of the interaction. Her subjects are not usually in the thrawls of another intrusion, but she can only hope she can reach her just enough.

Eyes to eyes, her moves in a slow drift from side to side like a swing upon a tree...back and forth, back and forth. Soon the poor girl speaks not at all...then in soft calming words the gypsy speaks, simple questions....

"Does this township hold records of the past?..A library?

"Nooo...Librarryy..." came a hollow dream like responce...

"Where are the old passages kept?...

"Haallll of Recooorrddds....."

Came those words, before the moaning began again, and the girl was lost once more to Teron Tragedy. Crying and screaming now, her hands begin to claw at her face.. the Gypsy rises, about to leave her, but as she looks down on her she cannot in good concious leave her to injure herself anymore.

Reaching down she grabs the girl once more, her hand moving over her mouth stiffling her screams, her other arm wraps around her neck and presses. choking her just enough to make her pass out. Laying the limp form gently in the corner she found her, she would lay a blanket over her and hope...yes hope that when she wakes she has no memory of this nightmare, or at the very least that it is over...

Then she was off again slipping through the dark of night, through and around fire and wails. If other were also lurking as they may, she would be careful to avoid being seen, she is not her for bloodshed. Truthfully she would think picking off unarmed madden peasant to be below only a cowards game.

She had a greater cause...What lies in the hall of Records, may explain why Teron Ashfiend went to such great length's to hide his presence in the township of Foggy Bottom and is his pattern continues as it has. It will be another piece of his past, another piece he is trying to hide from the world....

The building itself was near the town square, one of the larger building, it was beating on the outside from the madden people, but its heavy doors had yet to be breached. She moved around the side, a cracked window was soon broken through, the glass cleared and she was inside....

"Alright Teron....What did you hide here, all those years ago....