[Valoria Magna.]
[[Civitas Caelora.]]
[[[North-East of Avarnove.]]]
{{POV CHANGE}}
If there was any word to describe the location…
It was Unease.
Overhead, there was only a cage of tangled, mangled branches. They wove together in a suffocating lattice, blotting out the sun and leaving the world below in a perpetual, nyx twilight. There were no leaves. Not a single spot of green to suggest respiration or growth. Just wood. Dead, grey, fossilized wood clawing at the heavens.
Was it from anger? We're they throwing their brambles and cursing their creators?
Or was it a plea for pity?
This forest did not rustle. It did not sway. It only stood in a terrifying, sculpted silence that dares bely the hand of man's action.
Godspeed.
Godspeed moved through the undergrowth, his boots breaking the silence with the crunch of brittle twigs. The trees here were Wrong. Their bark was not a rough texture that only nathre could provide; nature, it seemed scorched, and looked scarred, stripped bare to reveal the white, bone-like timber beneath. They twisted in agony, freezing in shapes that suggested they had writhed in pain before they died. They felt less like flora and more like the last mention of life that had been burned away centuries ago.
As it was—there was no life here. No insects buzzed in the air. No birds sang. No skittering of prey. No rustles of hiding the noise or predators. What was supposed to exist, didn't: It was a vacuum of existence, a place where the concept of 'living' felt like an illusion. The trees loomed, their twisted limbs reaching out as if to snatch at the red intruder, barely suspended in a state that was oh-so-close to death, yet stubbornly remaining in the wrong plane of existence.
Godspeed did not bother to look up at the cage above him. There was no flinching from him as the jagged shadows feigned to attack him. He simply walked, his pace steady and rhythmic; the splash of red providing color to monochromatic wasteland. The blood to give a body life.
The dense packing of the trees eventually began to break, and as the forest thinned, shapes began to emerge from the gloom—angles and lines. Forged structures. He stepped over a fallen log and into what had once been a street.
[Umbrawick].
It was an old town, perhaps once bustling before the stagnation took hold. Now, it was an unnatural monument of history; a truth to the existence of a violent, slow-motion war between architecture and nature. And nature, even dead nature, had won.
Massive, leafless trees burst through the skeletal remains of buildings. Roots, thick as pythons, had punched through floorboards, shattering the stone foundations and curling around the rotting furniture inside like parasites. Branches—brittle, sharp brambles—had smashed through glass windows, weaving in and out of the rooms, claiming the interior space.
To his left, a two-story home had been bisected by a massive trunk that had grown straight through the roof, scattering slate tiles to make room for occupancy. To his right, a shop front was barely visible, its door unhinged and hanging loose, held up only by a knot of thorny vines that had pierced the wood.
It was a city impaled.
Godspeed stopped for a brief moment. His eyes scanned the devastation, taking in the fusion of ruined masonry and dead timber. He looked at the shattered glass reflecting the dull grey light. He looked at the roots that had cracked the cobblestone street. His expression remained non-giving, withheld from emotion, unmoved by the desolation. He adjusted the lantern on his belt, the metal clinking softly, and then he began to walk again. He did not bother wandering, exploring, perusing.
For, he held different intentions.
He moved through the ruined street with the sense of a man who knew exactly what he was looking for, where he was going.
There was one structure.
A structure that rose like a dead finger, aimed at an indifferent sky.
It stood in the middle of a choke-point in the street, disrupting the skeletal flow of the town. Towering above the warped rooflines, the stone here wasn't grey or black like the rest of Umbrawick. It was white—an eerie, ash-white. Dirtier. It looked as if the sun had burned the color out of it centuries ago, only for some unnatural heat to scour it clean after the fact. It stood stark against the nestling and netting of the dead trees, as if it were the only piece of this town to never have abandoned its identity.
Godspeed stepped over a rotted doorframe that had collapsed across the threshold, his boot crunching down on petrified wood. He moved carefully. The floorboards inside were warped, buckled upward by immense, gnarled roots that had ruptured the stone foundation.
The interior was hollow, a single expansive atrium that smelled of old air and filled with old dust. Shafts of weak light filtered through cracks in the high ceiling, slicing through the gloom to illuminate the most miniscule sights of ash still existent.
Originally.
It was a space designed for reverence, a hall built to humble those who entered. But the altar was empty. In the center of the room sat a massive stone plinth, its surface jagged and uneven. Whatever stood there had been shattered long ago.
Godspeed walked the perimeter, leaving tracks in the thick shroud of dust that carpeted the floor. He stopped near a pile of rubble in the corner and looked down.
What he saw was a face.
He saw a face staring back up at him from the grit.
It was carved from obsidian, the features heavy-browed and furious. Disconnected from a body, chipped and scarred.
It was His Holiness.
His Greatness.
His Despised God.
It was the head of [[Excidios]], and it looked less like a god, and more like expensive debris.
"Hrm."
Just a small hum. To then clear his throat, and nudge the stone head with the toe of his boot. He leaned down, gripping on the curved horn of the stone deity, and lifted it. It was heavy. He stared into the blank stone eyes for a heartbeat, his own swirling pupils narrowing in mild distaste.
"... Tch."
With a grunt, he tossed it behind him.
**CRSHH!!**
The head crashed into the far wall, shattering it's glassy surface and sprinkling it's pieces around. Godspeed ignored his god's demise, and approached the empty plinth.
He laid a hand against the cold stone, ignoring the sanctity of the place. He was looking for anomalies, tracking and searching for clues of… something. But all of the dust here lay thick, undisturbed for decades, uniformly grey and pelt over the entirety of the stone.
Except for onespot.
On the north face of the base, about waist-height, there was a patch of stone. Roughly a three-inch square. Here, the layer of ash was thin, inconsistent—as if someone, something, had brushed against it.
Or, perhaps the vibrations of the passing world resonated differently in the mechanism hidden behind it.
He hovered his index finger over the square.
A low tremor ran through the air, vibrating in the marrow of his bones. The air around his hand began to warp. A deep, ominous crimson light began to pulse from beneath the bandages on his fingertip, humming with the frequency of Destruction.
Barely… He touched the stone.
**Click.**
It was a sharp click that echoed in the hollow tower. Overtly loud was what followed it—the sound of tumblers falling, of ancient stone gears grinding against one another, awoken after slumber. Stone ground violently against stone, like a moan from deep earth announcing its awakening.
With a low, tectonic rumble, the massive stone base of the statue split down the middle. The two halves slowly slid apart.
What was revealed?
A simple square of darkness.
And, of course, If it weren't for the miniscule beam of light hitting this exact spot, it would've been difficult to notice the set of dark, spiraling stairs descending into the earth. What was below, it smelled... preserved.
And It felt like Secrets.
"...--Well," Godspeed murmured to the empty room, "Here I go."
He adjusted his belt, cast a glance back at the daylight fading in the doorway, and stepped into the suffocating dark.
The staircase was a narrow throat swallowing him whole.
Godspeed descended, his heavy boots making no attempt at stealth on the ancient stone steps. With each downward stride, the faint light from the entrance above grew fainter, until he was submerged in absolute darkness. A sightless void was what it was, where up and down began to lose their meaning. He couldn't see his own hands, even.
So he let himself feel around. He kept one hand trailing along the rough, cold stone of the wall to guide himself until, finally, the floor flattened out beneath his feet.
He was in a room. Or a hall. Or a cavern.
He stopped, standing still in the crushing dark, his senses straining for any sign of life. And for a long moment, there wasn't any. All was nothing. No breath. No movement. Not even a subtle ringing in the air. All that existed was the fact that he was damn-near buried underground.
Then, the air shifted.
A rustle of fabric to his right. A whisper of motion.
Godspeed began to turn his head, the vertebrae in his neck popping softly.
**SHIIIING.**
The sound was sharp, metallic, and intimately close. Before he could complete the turn, the cold bite of steel pressed against the side of his neck.
A blade. Held steady, with zero tremor.
"--Identify yourself," a voice growled from the darkness. It was a gravelly sound, rough and gritty, like stones grinding in a riverbed.
No panic escaped Godspeed. He just let out a sharp, dismissive click of his tongue.
"Tsk."
He didn't bother answering. Instead, he simply reached up with his bandaged hand, aiming to grasp the flat of the blade and snap it like a twig. He knew his strength. He knew his power. A simple sword was nothing to him.
But, moving to grab it….
**THWACK.**
… Instead caused a heavy palm to slam into the back of his head.
Disrespectful. A disrespectful, forceful push that sent Godspeed stumbling forward a step, knocking him off balance just as his fingers brushed the steel.
"Annoying brat," the gravelly voice muttered, the tone laced with disdain rather than caution.
As Godspeed regained his footing, snarling silently, he heard the heavy **CLUNK** of a lever being thrown somewhere in the dark.
**SNAP.** **HISSS.**
The distinct, sharp crack of flint striking steel echoed. Sparks flew, brief and bright, followed immediately by the **WHOOSH** of combustion. Fire raced along channels carved into the walls, igniting braziers one by one in a rapid domino effect. Orange light flared violently, banishing the shadows and revealing the subterranean chamber in flickering detail.
A Long table, plus chairs. Candles. Papers, books. A study, meeting, board-room or conference hall, whichever it was—
Under tons of stone, it was the best kept part of the entire Umbrawick area.
Godspeed blinked against the sudden brightness attacking his eyes, his hand still half-raised, before rolling his neck to crack it back into place after a certain Someone dared lay a hand on him. He made sure to level a bored stare at the man who had shoved him.
Said man was a mountain of a… Man; he was draped in heavy, dark plate armor that had clearly seen better decades. A tattered cloak, more rust than red, hung from one of his massive shoulders, doing little to hide the sheer bulk of him. He wasn't wearing a helmet, even though everyone in the world should pray that he does.
His face looked like a map of violence. Scarred, weathered, and caked with the grime of a man who lived underground, and an ear half torn off. His eyes were wide and frantic, bloodshot and twitching with the paranoid energy of a crazed warhound.
He stood with a massive greatsword resting on his shoulder, chewing on something, and staring at Godspeed with undisguised contempt.
[Templar Captain Kaelen].
"...You're lucky I didn't take your head off, Red Hair," [Kaelen] grunted, spitting a dark glob onto the stone floor near Godspeed's boot. "Creeping around in the dark like a rat."
Godspeed looked down at the spit. His jaw tightened. He opened his mouth, a sharp, overly-complicated retort forming on his tongue—
**HACK!**
A wet, rattling cough cut through the air like a serrated blade.
Godspeed closed his mouth, the words swallowed and kept at by by his throat. He looked toward the head of the mahogany table.
[Archbishop Caleo Vane].
Gaunt. Ill. Sick. All kinds of diseased modifiers could describe this sickly man, with thinned slicked-back black hair and skin that looked like wet dough. His body convulsed with yet another violent cough. He had to catch himself with the table's edge, panting, gasping, before clearing his throat.
"--W-we…We, are not here… to brawl in the dark," Caleo wheezed, his voice uneven and unwelcome to the ears, like an un-finely-tuned viola. "Sit down, Captain."
Kaelen sheathed his sword with a frustrated clatter and slumped into a chair, glaring at the wall.
"And you," Caleo continued. "The [High Executor]...Red Hair. Who deemed your presence necessary here?"
Before Godspeed could answer, a soft, sickening coo drifted from Caleo's left.
"--Oh, look at him," the voice dripped like spoiled hot sauce, sounding equally burnt from the vocal chords. "Looking all lost and scruffy. Like a little lost puppy wandering into the wolves' den."
It was [Bishop Gula].
Her face looked like the worst parts of a desert; dozens of sunken pores and dozens of deep wrinkles, all collapsing inward around her most terrifying feature: her eyes. They were sealed shut. Permanently. Yet she wore this perpetually insidious smile that stretched the loose skin of her face taut, with the shiniest teeth revealed unexpectedly.
It wasn't the expression of a blind woman—She truly was a wolf in docile clothing, with the look of a predator feigning malaise. A cold, damp sweat prickled on the back of Godspeed's neck looking at her—an instinctual reaction to the creeping certainty—No, hopefully only conjecture—that if she were to pry those lids open, there would be no whites, no irises, no pupils. Just voided, hollow darkness.
"Does the puppy need a tree~~at?" she asked, tilting her head at a broken angle, seeing him perfectly without ever opening her eyes. "Does he need his mommyyyy~~~ to wipe the dirt off his face?"
Godspeed felt his meager earnestness in wanting to come here draining away by the second. He ignored the crawling sensation on his skin and addressed Caleo directly, his voice flat and monotone.
"--I am here as the Right Hand of the Zeroed—[Bishop Gerrymander]," Godspeed stated, reciting the title with the enthusiasm of someone that really, really didn't care to be there. "As his appointed [Executor], I am here to fill his seat until the [Synod] sends a replacement."