Slayers; Redemption: Prologue and Episode 1: "Deathwind! The Incurable Disease?"

Slayers: Redemption

by

Yuri Futanari

and

Naga Shark

Prologue:

It was a cheerfully bright spring day in Zephilia where 2 brothers were digging a well in an open field when they came upon the heavy stone rooftop of a buried structure.

Returning to the village to ask for help, they entered the tavern where Luna Inverse served the patrons, and rounded up some unemployed travelers then returned to the site with plans to unearth the structure and take a look inside...

As the day wears on, the twenty men eagerly dig away with mule drawn plows, oxen pulling carts, baskets and spades, gradually unearthing an ornately carved deep green marble structure with what seems like fine veins of gold through it.

It becomes obvious that this is a crypt or a burial vault of some extremely wealthy person from long ago and they reason among themselves that surely it contains buried treasure!

The door to the structure is short but heavily constructed, and has many soil stained talismans secured to it by means of some resinous material. Each crossing the sill of the door, as if binding the door from being opened.

On each talisman is written characters of some strange language none of the men understand, and being simple travelers and not ones to be wary of magic or curses, they soon tear through the old paper talismans in effort to pry open the door.

As the last of the talismans is torn asunder, a mysterious fog quickly begins to seep through the crevices in the door sill...

Heedlessly, the men try pushing the handleless door with their full strength in hopes of discovering vast riches.

Merely minutes into their efforts however, the mysterious fog has taken its toll. Writhing upon the ground, crying and coughing up blood in agony, flush with the sweat of a burning fever, the men nearest the door lay gasping their last breaths while those further out begin crawling toward the village little better off.

The strongest of them makes it a mere half mile toward the village on hands and knees before collapsing into a comatose state...

As the warm spring day turned to evening, a breeze picked up, blowing leaves, flowers and the mysterious fog in the direction of Zephilia...

Episode 1:

Deathwind! The Incurable Disease?

Luna continued serving tables every day as usual, but she noticed a peculiar drop in the number of patrons the normally crowded tavern had.

One day a young man stumbled like a drunken man into the tavern looking very sickly and feverish shouting, "Run for your lives! A plague has invaded Zephilia!" before stumbling back out in the direction of the next building on the street.

A murmur arose from the tavern patrons and people were already out in the streets screaming and scooping up their children, hiding indoors from the words being shouted in the streets by the afflicted young man.

Finally collapsing in the center of town near the fountain, he lay there coughing blood onto the street, eyes glazed, unable to continue on.

A certain elderly lady dressed in subdued but elegant attire strode casually with a rather regal air up to the young man. As her pine green dress with white ruffles stopped swaying with her purposeful stride, she carefully prodded the young man with the end of her cane only to see a strange pale violet light flash off the end of her cane leaving a hole in the man's shoulder as deep as a thumb tip.

Blood begins to flow rapidly and unchecked from the gaping wound, only to mysteriously evaporate on the ground... Soon the breathing stops and the blood stops flowing, the indentation continuing to make the dead man's body simply cease to exist at a visible rate.

"This is no normal infection!" she declares in alarm.

The hole now continues to grow deeper and wider while blood cascades from the gaping wound until the heart stops beating

Stepping back quickly, Laura Magnus casts a ward-wind spell and then uses ray-wing to fly away from the immobile body as the suddenly activated curse plague seems to utterly dissolve the poor young man into thin air.

Ep 1, chapter 2

Luna came home not terribly tired because there were so few patrons and the town was buttoned up tight, but she was not terribly worried about it because she didn't seem to see it as her problem.

When she stepped in the door and hung her shawl on the peg nearby, she did not immediately realize that her mother and grandmother were both standing in the kitchen staring at her expectantly.

Humming to herself, Luna proceeded to her room obliviously and change into her off work clothes consisting of a rather elegant dress much like her mother and grandmother wore.

Coming back from her room and waltzing merrily into the kitchen she finally see them and stops short. "What?" she asks confused and slightly suspicious because of the looks on their faces.

"You prance around here like there is nothing in the world wrong while there is a plague besieging our lands!" Lana sternly scolded.

"I saw that." Luna replied almost dumbly, clearly unconcerned.

"What kind of servant of Ceiphied are you to just nonchalantly turn your back on the people?"

"The kind who works a job as a waitress at the local tavern mother," she said seemingly clueless, "What else would you expect me to do?" acting incredulous to the idea that she may in some manner be responsible for anything unless Ceiphied himself commanded it of her.

"I did not raise my children to wander around not caring what happens to the people of this world young lady, and I will not begin to tolerate it at this point either!" snapped her mother.

Grandma Laura nodded and harrumphed in agreement.

"So you want me to call on Ceiphied for some miracle?" Luna asked defensively.

"I want you to go out there and find an answer to what is happening and why." Lana replied.

"I don't see how it is any of our business," Luna coolly replied.

About that time, a young man who tended the grapes in the orchard burst into the house nearly falling, panting heavily and yelling frantically, "Mistress Inverse! Mistress Inverse!" terror filling the young man's eyes, "Master Antonio has collapsed! I think its the plague!"

Fixing a dead eyes stare on Luna, "Don't come back to this house without a cure!" Lana coldly proclaimed.

Ep 1, Chapter 3

Luna Inverse was not fond of traveling, and did not own any traveling clothing, but not wanting to go with only her main outfit, she packed a few dresses and some night wear, collected her savings and weapons, not sure how long she would be away, but from the sounds of it, as long as it would take.

Not wishing to come back to Zephilia in need of a new job, her first stop was the inn where she formally announced she must take leave until the plague was cured.

"I have no objection Mistress Luna," the inn's owner Alyth replied in her calm wise voice, "After all," she pointed out while slowly wiping down the shiny bar top, "If this keeps up, you won't have a job to come to because we'll all be dead."

Some of the weary travelers looked up from their meals with droopy sad and hopeless looks on their faces as they seemed to halfheartedly poke at the food despite it being legendary as the greatest cuisine in the northern region.

Her husband Bruno ducked his immense head down to peer out from the kitchen window and added, "Yeah and its going to get mighty boring around here with no crazy bar frights to liven this place up at night!" with a roaring laugh that filled the nearly vacant dining hall.

A couple of patrons tried to smile weakly at the big man and he looked back at them compassionately.

As the gravity of the situation bore down more deeply on the fiery young woman, she drew a deep breath and let out a sigh, then leaned over and gave the buxom older woman a warm hug and said to both of them, "You two take care of your selves!" and as she turned toward the door, she looked over her shoulder and said, "As the Knight of Ceiphied I shall find the cure for this!"

One could see Alyth behind the bar waving, and Bruno's massive lone hand waving from the kitchen portal as she stepped forth from the inn forward on her new quest and first ever long journey away from her beloved homeland. Above her the tavern's brightly painted shingle "Alyth's All Welcoming Inn."

The lonely street with shuttered windows a grim reminder that this was no ordinary day in the village she had grown up in.

Ep. 1, Chapter 4

Luna could not ask anybody but the village physician about the plague any more because the town was already sealed shut and most of the village was already abandoned. Most of the people in the village were at the livery where as many as two hundred townsfolk were laying on makeshift cots of straw and bedsheets from the clinic, Luna had

The village physician could only tell her that magic healing spells only advanced the plague and that once a spell was cast, the only thing he could do at that point was to invoke a spell reversal and give the patient sedatives to slow their bodily function.

Somehow, by sedating the victims with the eye fluids of the Taricha newt, he had slowed their decline by slowing their metabolism to a very low rate bordering on death its self.

He was taking as much sedative as he could manage because he had to assume he was infected as well, and had only to remain alert to service any who came to him in search of help or he would have already administered enough sedative to put himself into a state of near death the same as his patients.

The only useful information she could get from the physician about the source was that it seemed to have begun not long after a pair of young brothers discovered a small crypt like structure north of the village about half a day's journey, and that none of the actual travelers who went to help them unearth the discovery or the brothers themselves ever made it back to town.

Leaving the physician's side at the livery with a record first ever time thanking anybody, Luna had to figure out a solution and soon or this would literally become a ghost town, and who knew how far this plague would spread!

Hurrying along the path to the north, the discovered that it forked four ways about a hour out of town.

"Well this isn't very good," she frowned at the fork in the road, "I can't spend forever traveling for days looking for the source of this plague, and asking Ceiphied for information will leave me in such a state I'll be even worse, so I have to look for something..." she thought to herself while looking all around for anything to give her a clue...

As she scanned around, focusing her mental chi on her eyesight to give herself additional distance of view up each road, it became evident that the road second from the right seemed to exhibit an unnatural deadness about it for such a vibrant spring as they had been experiencing this year.

"Hmmmmm..." she pondered, "Dead foliage here in the height of spring...this must be the path."

As she proceeded along this path, the dead spots in the grass filled in totally until there was no living grass and the trees along the sides of the path were showing brown spots.

The grass finally seemed to be so shriveled up as to be nothing but wisps and soon even that gave way to bare ground.

As she crested the next hill, she found a skeleton laying in the path in clothing, and some dead ravens laying around it with their eyes missing, and not a single fly or odor could be detected.

In fact, there was not a single sound of animals anywhere and the deadness seemed to proceed into the forest, and many of the nearby trees were bare sticks of white wood which seemed to be turning slowly to dust even as she watched.

As she probed at the corpse with her powerful magically infused sword however, a strange violet light seemed to erupt from the point of contact and in seemingly seconds with a strange hissing sound rapidly consumed the skeleton into nothingness before her very eyes, and as it destroyed the bones, the cloth in contact with the bones also appeared to 'burn' away with the same smokeless violet light, leaving a skeleton shaped hole in the now flattened out clothing.

Reflexively leaping away in horror and revulsion, she carefully inspected the tip of her sword to see if it had suffered any damage, but apparently, its magical barriers kept whatever was there from devouring it.

"This is some wicked evil stuff!" she exclaimed aloud, "This is no mere plague, this is something supernatural and magical!"

As she sheathed her sword, she proceeded along the path, finding more and more crumbling skeletons in clothing, clearly more decayed by the unknown cause as she went.

By midday, she came to a point where the entire forest was missing for a hundred paces on each side of the path and only metallic items such as coins and weapons remained unaffected.

"Wow," she worried to herself, "This stuff destroys everything eventually!" As she looked around it came to her, "This stuff could in time literally destroy the entire world!"

The bones were gone, the clothing was shreds, holes lay in the ground where trees once stood, and she could see in the distance a large hole in the ground with the roof of a structure barely visible near its center.

Coming to the lip of the pit, she saw only crumbling pieces of metal around a seemingly impervious stone crypt where pieces of tattered paper hung loosely on the edges of the doorway obviously at one time blocking the opening of the door.

There was a ramp dug from the side of the pit down to the middle where people once walked in and out of the pit.

There seemed a slight odor to the air and she became uneasy because she was aware that this cursed force was able to destroy so many things that normal plagues would never touch.

Testing her theory, she drew her blade and the air around it sizzled and glowed violet as something seemed to almost be feeding off the power in her blade...

"That's it!" she cried aloud, "Its feeding off of energy!" looking around and sheathing her sword again, "I'm only alive because of the divine protection of Ceiphied!"

Walking up to the torn talismans of warding and sealing, she could see why the whole event happened now. "These men got greedy and came here thinking they were going to find a king's buried treasure only to open up a Pandora's Box of sorts, releasing a cursed...something on themselves and the whole world in the process!"

Attempting to read the talismans proved impossible as she had no idea what language they were written in.

"I need to find somebody who knows magic who can..." she paused, "Hey... I know just the person for this job!"