Soft, cold earth sticking between fingers and burying itself deep beneath the nail. Hard, unyielding stones so heavy on the backs and shoulders of those forced to heave them from their resting places. Decaying leaves and snaking plant life ripped away from lone hillside perfuming the air amidst the scent of wood rot and oncoming rain. A silent forest standing as witness to shifting and robed figures working tirelessly through long, harrowing nights. In the distance, a solitary howl briefly shattered the smothering quiet, high and inhuman. It was the only animal sound they've heard in weeks and for a moment they paused... but only for a moment.
Three weeks to find the right spot among the shifting paths of the Brecilian forest, two more to uncover the entrance. Ugly, broken pillars; once barely visible through a screen of writhing vines and cruel thorns, now bare like bone and bathed in torchlight. None who saw them wanted to venture past them, into the still darkness that sat like an open mouth in the hillside. But, a rough boot heel on the back of an exhausted elf sent her and her torch stumbling forward. Not a single breath was heard until the slave righted herself and picked back up her fallen scrap of light. A sigh then, a momentary feeling of foolishness at being afraid of an open passageway. But with a half dozen guardsmen lost to wildlife or simply gone without trace in the weeks prior, even mighty Venatori mages can learn to be cautious.
Wouldn't this mission be completed already if they had more than a handful of apostates to bolster their numbers? Most likely, and the loss of good, loyal imperial soldiers was not a mark Laelius looked forward to including in his report back to Calpurnia. But as he strode forward, passing the cringing slave without so much as a look and into the damp tunnel of ancient elven ruins, he prayed to the elder one that it wouldn't be a complete loss.
Collapsed passageways and ropey spiderwebs that clung to the very swords hacking away at them slowed the Venatori's progress to a crawl. But it was not all misfortune and headache, for most of the traps that had been set in eons past had been disarmed. Thin wires cut years before lay curled in the dust and jaws forged of iron stood snapped shut among the dried out husks of giant spiders and taint stricken wildlife. A few of Laelius' lessers found their nerves bolstered by this slow but uneventful pace… bolstered enough to complain.
How sweet the swift silencing of their hushed whining when they arrived at the ritual chamber. An empty dias with glass shards laying dark in the dust. Laelius swept them aside with a disinterested boot. Beyond the shaft of filtered light pooling from the broken ceiling above, stood a shadowed statue with wings held wide. Some ugly elvish thing, left to rot in the ruins along with everything else. He struck it with lightning just to watch it crack and smirked as the left arm crashed to the floor in splintered marble.
"Fergus," he called, motioning the apprentice over with a lazy wave. "Have them bring in the basins, I wish to begin as soon as possible."
"Shall I have Haelia prepare the slaves?" Fergus was using his staff to lean on, a southern mage trait Laelius found most amusing. The fresh cuts peeking from the edges of the apostate's robes were a more recent habit of course, one Laelius also found amusing.
"So eager to see blood flowing aren't you?" The Venatori couldn't help but chuckle. So nice to see some enthusiasm so far south. Pity they hadn't been able to recruit more, losing the Redcliffe mages had wounded more than just their pride. Still, collecting Kirkwall's resident blood mages had been an excellent choice even if his next assignment certainly didn't feel like a reward.
"I'm just curious is all." The younger man grinned with a flash of teeth that purely predatory. "I've never seen a demon from 'beyond the fade'."
Laelius merely shrugged with one crimson clad shoulder. How to explain it to a mage that had grown up in a prison? How to correct his assumption? Could he even begin to explain the things he'd seen? He shook his hooded head and reached for the ritual tome. If it worked as it was supposed to, then he wouldn't have to explain, the results would speak for itself.
"Let us prepare the chamber. There is still much to do."
It took longer than he wanted and yet seemingly no time at all. Sigils were painted along the floor with precise strokes, braziers were lit and a potent mix of herb and incense added until the air was hazy with the smoke and warmth. Laelius stood in the center of the ritual space with tome in hand and a pleading slave kneeling at his feet. He spoke in echoing ivocation, eyes half closed as his thoughts became will and his will became power. The others chanted in their trance, focusing on him, filling him with energy until it threatened to spill across reality.
He pulled it in, shaped it along the dagger in his hand and thrust it down along the slave's trembling throat. Pleased and intrigued, the spirits stirred on the other-side. They pushed and pulled, straining against the press of the Veil. But these did not interest him. Flimsy mockeries of base human emotions, no, he shook them away from his mind.
Like a sailor waits upon an ocean black and baits the waters with a drop of blood, Laelius let the slave's blood flow into the waiting basin. When the spray had slowed to a drip, he pushed the body away with his foot and motioned for the next one to be handed to him. Never once did his cadence break. Never once was his focus lost. The second one tumbled down the dais to lay motionless with the first. three more past the same way, each whimpering or wailing until the soldiers began gagging them before throwing them in front of him. He barely noticed, his eye watching only the line of crimson liquid as it steadily rose.
As the blade dimpled the flesh of the six victim he felt the brush of something worthy. Something alien.
He reached for it instinctively.
Keeper Lanaya held a cloth over her nose and mouth, every meal she had ever considered eating threatening to leave her.
It was carnage. There was no other word for it. Not even living with shem bandits had prepared her for what she was seeing now.
The chamber reeked of spoiled meat and worse things. There was no inch of the floor that wasn't covered in the dried and sticky remains of something once human. Those corpses that remained whole were twisted in on themselves in ways that broke the mind. Here a mage had torn out his own throat, there a guard had gutted his fellow before turning the blade on himself. Every body they passed had suffered a similar fate, each face contorted into a look of absolute terror. And in the center of it all, knelt a thing she couldn't understand.
When her hunters had returned to her with a scared elven boy shivering between them she hadn't known what to make of it. It wasn't uncommon for them to get runaways. But the boy had been white as a spirit and splashed with blood under a layer of mud. She'd thought slavers at first but then the boy had started talking and things had only gotten worse.
Now she stood in a ruin, looking at so much death and evil while a pair of unblinking green eyes stared at her. Clan Sabrae had been right, this place was cursed.
"What should we do with it?" Camman stood a touch behind her but was going to great lengths not to look directly at the thing staring at them. All it could do was stare, being bound by heavy chains to the floor and behind what Lanaya recognized to be a barrier. A damn tricky one too, considering it was being sustained even after its caster had perished. They'd found his body just outside the chamber. Still facing his opponent, a dagger jutting from his gut.
Lanaya tried to take a full breath and found herself choking on it. When the coughing had stopped she tried think. "I'm not sure," she admitted, trying not to make actual eye contact. "I'd say banish it back to where ever it they summoned it from, but I'm not sure what will happen when that barrier comes down."
"Well we can't just leave it…" Gheyna whispered from off to her right. She looked as green as Lanaya felt.
"No. No, we can't…" She took a trembling step towards the dais.