In the Valleys of a Perfect Engine
Chapter I.
Into the wretched gale of a prewinter maelstrom the former patrician Farnese de Vandimion trudged like a misplaced Eastertide soul in tireless search of a portal back to some kinder eon.
She carried with her only the barest collection of possibles – a small satchel stocked with the immediate necessities of an acolyte witch, a rudimentary staff the length of her own body, an arcane dagger encased in a complementary sheath that hung from her hip on a rugged belt borrowed from an old friend. Draped as she was in a thick and woolly shawl her teeth chattered spasmodic as if the glacial aeolus had bid her to chew invisible cud in penitence for her alien presence.
The path she walked led presently into the maw of a huge ravine swallowed up in gratuitous shadow. No alternative routes presented themselves. Above the spectral gully a black shire of thunderclouds fulminated in strident chorus, staining primeval omens electric across the gloaming sky. At the behest a mighty clang the stormdrunk firmament began to cough volleys of ragged hail onto the earth like clots of insects frozen midswarm. Veritable was the sloughing wasteland that did arise out of the smog amidst these climatic auguries.
Tightening the hood of her heavy sheepfrock the acolyte witch Farnese slogged onward.
Tiny unearthly lifeforms skittered about the darkened corridor into the ravine. Furred and oily. Slavering like mindless hounds. They were of no consequence to her. Long had she barricaded the inner sanctum of her mind against all rapturous arrest by dreadful epiphany of beast. With a clarifying thrust she raised her staff to cast a simple ward around herself, spiritglass rippling along magical veins in the gloom. Squeals of agony and a cleansing hum filled her ears as grim intruders evaporated upon crossing its aureate swell.
Shield aflame she traversed the leaching ravine past yammering demonspawn and heartrending flashes of the oblivion beyond the mortal world, where billions of souls voyaged about in slumber on tiny glimmering vessels toward an everlasting horizon. Solace grew increasingly harder to maintain in the presence of such nebulous miracles while upon the road. Past a decrepit bogside lodge where the voided windows teemed with grotesque mirages Farnese came upon a mosseaten sign crying warning in broken language of a perilous cave somewhere on the verge. It would lay there, she knew. The hidden gift.
Deepladen fear reanimated in her belly at the sight of a mass impromptu necropolis of slipshod skeletal architecture at the mouth of the cave. Petrified bone villages, animal and man and beyond. She quivered, halting to summon her wits. Reciting small refrains to purify her well of focus. Fortuitously the shield did not waver. A sudden preternatural wail at her rear goaded her to bolt into the cavern in spite her terror, a frantic whisper setting the tip of her staff alight with an orbicular incandescence. Just beyond the entrance she discovered an enormous grotto roughly the size of the main hold of her lord father's manor. Plagueridden lepidoptera flitted about the muggy air like the parasitic dispersions of some ailing elden tree. Below their airborne satellites rotting stalagmites garrisoned the wet expanse in happenstance formation, and unnamable fauna of the grotto's eternal night passed to and fro in the everdusk to land on their malformed tips with soft leathery squelches. What birthed them shaped the dogwhelk's shell. On the rocky ceiling a thatch of sickly moonlight glowed and bequeathed upon that intestine of the earth a bizarre dreamlike character in which all things seemed hopelessly transient, mere simulacra of material things.
Farnese kept her staff above her head as she plunged on, the frail luster revealing slimecovered walls that narrowed in continuity the further she went on. Ominous the small organisms inhabiting therein began to recede in number until she could only spot a mutant bat or peculiar lizard every so often. The magical shroud which swaddled her flickered as she overtook a strange runic installation set in the center of a culvert someplace along the descending tunnel. Whining as if conscious of its impending demise the ward flashed brilliant and then evaporated.
She froze at once. Cavesounds quickened to replace the susurrant drone of the magical barrier, the scuttling of disturbing insects and the swishing of hidden wings like the ruckus of some terrible forest at the rising dawn of an apocalypse. She attempted to cast the spell again – to no avail. Something was hampering all forms of magical connection, although the sphere of light at the tip of her staff endured. She could not visualize the basic essence of the spiritworld within her mind's eye save a winnowing dross of ghostwater. Whatever lay in the bowels of the cave certainly had awareness of her Od if it could tamp the tides of sorcery. Panic hovered close at the nape of her neck, cold sweat surfacing across the pastel flesh.
Wild tremors suddenly carried through the cave not far from the place where the ward had vanished. She clung to a nearby stalagmite, ducking her head to avoid the sodden exuviations which fell in bursts from the ceiling. After a few moments of alarm the burrow settled. She glanced up in time to witness an eldritch spider the size of a housecat scurry out of a wasted hole in the rock and flee in the direction she had come.
A poor sign, all things considered.
Familiar doubts filled her soul as she withdrew the dagger from her waist and positioned it close to her hip. The hilt was colder than ice. The temptation to pray soon found her, tantalizing the promise of comfort. She rebuked it. Her requests would be futile without the link to the realm of phantasmic Od.
The tunnel pitched downward in sudden decline past a primordial talisman that dangled from a low archway of stone. Farnese paused there, peering down into the abyssal tube for a time, before snatching the suspended ornament and severing the cord of grimy beads which secured it to the ceiling barely a foot above her head. Tarcolored and inscribed with hieroglyphs the likes of she could not parse she turned the bauble over in her long-fingered hands until a small purple stone at its center commenced to pulsing with a staggeringly radiant glimmer.
From deep in the indefinite remainder of the cave came a howled shriek akin to a mad jackal at hunt.
Grip on the dagger quaking Farnese descended the slope of tunnel with careful feet. She continued in this manner for what felt like hours, one arm leaning on the wall with her stave, the other leveling the miniature bladed weapon into the blackness resolute and altogether useless. Silence presided the entirety of her sinking journey, which she found much worse than the cacophony of cave inhabitants going about their business. Relief from this seemingly interminable limbo found her only as the tight conduit started to flatten and pour out into a massive subterranean den as wide as a lakebed.
Despite the mysterious magical obstruction Farnese could sense in an instant the aura of the object which she desired. Idling in the profound shade. She tread without hesitation into the hyperdark chasm, propelled by a precipitous buoyancy. In her skull a self-affirming incantation worked in a loop, the best substitute she could muster for the failed ward. She made it not a dozen strides headlong when a bloodred illumination colonized every inch of the spacious cavity's lichencovered rock. Through a haphazard shield of digits, Farnese discerned its source – a rangy shape obscured in a ragged mantle which held aloft a staff three times as large as her own, capped with an abhorrent twisted icon composed of dehydrated biologic structures. A nearly irrepressible gasp curbed upon her lips.
The figure lowered the rod and croaked to her in a voice like a wrecked mill.
"Many blessings go unnoticed by the sordid mortal races. So often their numbers die believing their destiny somehow the product of their own faculties. An appalling state of affairs. You, on the other hand…there is an invigorating humility afloat your spirit. Almost, perhaps, worth preservation."
Farnese sucked a clod of mucus down her throat. "Who are you, cavedweller?"
"Of what value is my identity to you, trespasser?" The veiled being drove the foot of his staff into the ground. "Do you expect human formalities from even God Himself? The purpose which has led you here has already been revealed. Any convention between us has been voided heretofore."
"That's an awful shame," said Farnese as she readied the dagger. "Tell me where you've concealed the Arm, and I'll allow you to die in anonymity as you so wish."
It took a few moments for the acolyte witch to realize the hoarse fit of expectoration which issued from the veiled being were guffaws. With a slash of her staff, she seized a large hunk of cavernstone with a formless hand and hurled it with infuriated might at its head. The missile sailed through the humid air like the conveyance of a trebuchet until it exploded into hundreds of razorous fragments barely midway toward its target. Farnese flinched as she summoned a wisp of a barrier a second before the shrapnel reached her, rockshard dissolving into plumes of silt.
"Knavish woman," the veiled being groused. "I would have laundered your soul in the wondrous absolution of my gut for a tender age. You will instead go to Death unprepared."
A ghastly flourish, and then a powerful upsurge of kinetic miasma phased across the chasm in but a trice, flinging Farnese to the ground in a painful heap. She struggled to her knees to search feverishly for the dagger knocked loose from her grip. Wretched tendrils of slimy flesh erupted from the ground and seized her fast, pinning her legs and wrists immobile. Farnese screamed at the sudden imprisonment as she thrashed around in vain effort to liberate herself.
Another rattling laugh. "There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens…"
WHIRR. CLANG.
Inaugural percussive number of a wild battle opera. The music of great impending struggle as blunt and robust as the blows of a mighty warhammer. Farnese looked hastily for the source of the stentorian clangor…
And then he crystallized black out of the bloated gloom like some terrifying inversion of an Archangel, the titan who walked her dreams.
Ether bestowed perfection of form, the spectral corporation of the Black Swordsman appeared at her side in an instant. Her heart somersaulted to embed in her windpipe. The titan glanced down at her in twinklespan and…
Was that…a wink?
The veiled being wailed with an indescribable furor, spinning its occult staff in complex choreography to raise a macabre host of groaning corpuses out of the stonework like blobs of necrotic flesh squeezed miraculously through infinitesimal fissures in the earth. The Black Swordsman wasted not a fraction of a moment, drawing his immense weapon to cleave the fabric of space and time with an astounding fluidity of purpose and abruptly reemerge an armlength from the cavedweller's minions. With a plangent sweep of his megalithic blade the titan hewed a third of the abominations into an assortment of gory slabs, their innards scattering like buckets of putrid eels overturned. Hitchless he piloted the sword contrariwise through another throng of underlings as jets of subhuman carnage painted his features tigerstripe.
Grave terror seemed to stay the leftover beasts, but the titan engaged them not. He leapt instead clear over the gruesome assembly, blade poised high, before directing it in a circular yaw to bring it down onto the veiled being like the motion of a greataxe. The cavedweller thrust out his staff perpendicular in hopes of blocking the blow, but the meager rod shredded to powdered splinters in an instant as the sword proceeded unstoppable to split him asunder with so much force only the remnants of his ravaged limbs remained.
It was over.
"Guts!"
Behold this strange messianic titan. With a single wrist he flicked the enormous blade to rid it of the congealing cruor, raising a misshapen median of blood on a nearby cave wall. Farnese fell victim to a wild thrall of joy, jumping to her feet as the hellish vines released her and dissipated as if they had never eclipsed the mortal plane. The titan Guts sheathed his weapon and turned to face the lapsed noblewoman with a wily smirk.
"Lady Farnese. It's been some time."
Some rational dimension of her heart stayed her feet as she faced the overwhelming impulse to make a fool of herself. A great sadness rode in on the heels of her high spirits, but it did not dampen the blissful expression on her face. She ever so slightly lifted a hand.
How many tricks had this odious delve played on her mind? "I don't know if I should believe it," she murmured. "Guts…is it really you?"
He chuckled, a devious spool of leaves rustling. And then he breached the few yards between them in but two steps to wreath her form in a columnar arm and compress her gracile form flush with his own. Farnese choked. She had never known Guts to offer comfort to anyone, let alone express even the barest hint of human foible. Was this the man buried beneath the animus of rage? Could it be that his soul had been shuttered away that whole era, yearning to release whatever form of altruistic dicta? With a deep shudder of admission, she threw her arms around him, relishing even the coarse scrape of his giant cloak.
A host of motley spirits dwelt in his lone pitchblack eye as he looked down upon her. "Thought you might like a hand. But I'm not so sure you needed it."
"I appreciate the gesture, Guts," she said, flaxen head dipping. "It wasn't necessary. I'm afraid I'll be little more than a liability until I learn magic a bit faster…"
Guts released her from their embrace. "Farnese."
She cast a bleary gaze up at him.
"Kill those thoughts," he requested, guiding an elevated hand to run two candelabrum digits along her slender jaw. "They're lies. Trust me — I dealt with them a long time. I've seen you do extraordinary things. Don't so easily forget that."
She trembled, gripping his fingers with a grateful fist.
"By the way," he went on, gesturing toward her hair with his free hand. "Have I told you how much this style suits you?"
Grinning, she swatted him with a splayed palm as she touched gently a lock of the golden strands. "Only a couple dozen times."
"Well," he said. "Maybe I'll have to dial back."
Guts planted on the wet stones on that note, leaving Farnese looming over him, mouth agape.
"Not in the cards!"
