The #Broken_Dagger Forum

Revania...

i am not weak.

And so you are not, and so you will listen. So we will speak, as mother unto unborn daughter... and you shall realize what is in that bulging belly of yours.

we cannot speak of my babe; i came to free you, do you see? i thought if i helped you, then might you help me.

For fear of your very own existence, child, you would do well not to free me in this regard. Have you too not been a slave, Revania Rin`arie? I know your name, and would you free me from this pain I have taken so readily?

i --

No, sweet child. You will free me in other ways. What is within your body, young elf? What... are you breeding?

**

A sleeping mind often indulges in the most extraordinary of otherwise repressed though nevertheless innate desires; a sleeping mind must have the consumption of such things, such food, else there is no point to the Dreaming, no point to the moment of subconscious dominance and conscious submission. It must be that ethereal, that pregnant with necessity. And yet to a creature of the ether itself, a sleeping mind is all of these things desperately enhanced, like a painting with its colors made infinitely more vibrant, more prolific.

Think for a moment on the concept of sleeping Reverie, whose definitive talent is the work of Dream, the sensual products of the web. Consider: what she cannot know in her waking reality, she must often endure, by searching, in her innocent repose. The girl-child had queries; her sleep would contain the answers. The whole of the city had queries, and had whispered them to her, speaking of the pert and round fertility of the girl's immaculately virgin womb; that is the crux of it, when Reverie dared to Dream. And what a sleep is it, potent and drastically pregnant.

That is how she considered it.

That is what she thought.

**

there is a miracle growing within me. the black king gave this to me, do you see? audmathus says i am ugly and foolish, but in the end, he must --

I believed once that you were weak. And you have aided me, beautiful Revania Rin`arie, slave-child of The Land That Is A Lie, by striking a blow and giving me the heart of this demon, whose sins saw that it was slain by your hand.

he is very fine; this is my present, and he says i am a good girl.

Do not trust this black king, this Audmathus. My goddess thought fit to force me to trust his wills, and he has done this to me -- he has destroyed what was once powerful, holy, and blessed... and he wished for your conception only to mock me, to mock you. I am a baneful creature; I have slaughtered, I have spilled the blood of those who have opposed me. I have slaughtered my very siblings... and this, this... is what I have been given. And now, as I have been given once before, like a toy that is meant to be repaired and then broken, and repaired yet again... to you. Let us not follow the sequitur of one who seeks to hurt you, and seeks to hurt me. Let us change this.

who are you?

I am what you wish me to be. I shall grow and thrive, and be borne as you wish me to be birthed. He believes you are weak, and is using you to carry my essence.

i do not know you.

He has tainted your womb with the blood of demons; be not fooled by his manipulation, child. Cecinefien Audmathus Xhevus, reincarnated by the fingers of a dreaded priestess, seeks only to serve himself. I am his blade, Revania Rin`arie. He has enslaved me at the will of his goddess, and has not granted me my peace!

you must tell me your name.

I seek not to hurt you, Revania Rin`arie. If this is what I wished to do, then surely I would have done so -- I would have allowed you to free me from these chains, would have swallowed you in greed. But we are one now...

you would be so pretty, if only you would let me help you down...

Do you not know why you have sought me out? What grows within you, little one, is me! When I am reborn, his sword will vanish, and I will be yours, infantile, forgetful... created anew, knowing nothing of how we speak now, knowing never what I have done in my past. My flesh will be only flesh. Do not please him, for he is one who desires only to destroy you, and your baby. I, too, Revania, was once a mother.

you are my baby... you are my baby, and he will not take you.

Because you are powerful. It is never the case, when a mere child must defend the likeness of a high priestess, of one of my past goddess' own elite... but I am yours now. Embrace your darker aspects, and I will be born a creature of murder and torture. And never thought I that I would seek protection for the peace of my existence in the hands of a creature whose origin my own should boldly label as wretched and unfitting.

i am ugly.

Will you protect me, sweet Revania?

i will love you, and my sister will love you; and none may get from me what i do not want...

Will you allow me... to protect you?

i will; i will.

I will trust you, Revania Rin`arie. .. You will not be his tool, his toy, or his slave. You are far, far too strong. You will bear me, and you will make me yours... Mother...

who are you?

My name, child... is Avel.

**

Her sleep was fed; it was satisfied, complete, like a hungry child suckling cruelly at a milk-full breast. And when it finished; it ground to a halt; it shattered into shards of glass and rays of darkness. Her mind was like to breaking a massive mirror of existence itself, and seeing it fall beyond the frame; though there was no frame, and now, entirely, there was nothing but the web, stretching its silver threads pleasantly, dangerously. Nothing but the web, which like a tapestry unraveling soon did its best to fade, to vomit her from its recesses like unchewed meat.

She was sitting upon a chair; this was the only perfect thing that she could do. For it is important to mark the utterly vapid expression, or nonexpression of her full-moon face; as if she had been frozen into place, listening to a far-off, innately compelling circumstance. See too that her small feet hung far above the floor, that the toes were curled and painted red with flesh. That she woke without waking.

("Look down, songbird...")

A small black spider tore its way through the gelatinous substance of her eye, and it scurried from her socket, trailing gore; it crawled as spiders will down the childishly-formed confines of Reverie's face. It dropped to the floor like a piece of coal, and drowned in the blood pouring from her womb.

("Look down upon... perfection.")

"Let us speak of this: the bride of your plans, the heart of your wicked ways growing in the womb of the child."

"The singing bird, the elven deceiver. The coal what holds the gem."

"What prevents any of us from destroying the vessel? Or, rather, the plague which grows within her!"

"What you see is a weakling child. Yet I am confident in my choice."

"Where is she, Audmathus! Why have you not fetched her, kept her suffocatingly close? Has your songbird flown too far away on wings of fear?"

"She is walking proof that she is a vessel of complete capability. And you have done nothing, Madam Valteri, but strengthen my resolve in my choice."

"You depend upon the virgin innocence of a child. Quite the risk willing to be taken with your deemed 'holy creation.'"

He was thoughtful; there it was in a yawning and terrible and black sprawl of hand pressed atop a table; and his blade began to sing and to shriek as if it had ribs that were being broken; it screamed, knowing her, hallowed and haunted in its desperation. The blade, like the finest grace in his hand, spun; and as if to silence its woeful shadow-tears, he slammed it downwards into the breadth of the bloodied slab, driving it through stone as if it were meant to destroy such formidable things as stone. It was this: a moment of flawless stasis as such things are meant to be; it was a moment of precious interlude; Audmathus was speaking with a brutality worsened only by the rancid ingress of teeth, and the shudder of figure, and considerable thought.

"... There is no innocence there. We speak, and Revania comes. Shadowdancer is no liar."

**

Perhaps it was in the end nothing more than that they had spoken of Reverie.

She had longed to find Audmathus since Avel's exquisite moment of revelation; they were the both of them wild and almost bestial creatures, primitive in their sarcophagi of desires, damning in the severity of their construction. He had at one point spoken her name, while seated safely in his own sanctuaries, and she came when she was called; that was her way which she could not deny; as legendary leeches cannot pass over a threshold without invitation, so did the woman-child find her name innately compelling and impossibly irresistible.

Yet it was the sword she came for and not the drow. Shadowdancer, sensing her, hissed weakly like steam rising in poisonous plumes, the entity's breath damning upon the psyche, her very desperation enough to condemn the ear of Audmathus: 'give me to her! reunion! reunite me!' It began with a flicker at the edge of the eye, practically unnoticeable; it began with an image that was not an image, a visual interruption, as if the positives and negatives of a film had twisted unto themselves. It was patient, infected, affected, ethereal, swallowed and suckled by surrealism. It began to swell, to clarify without being clear, as if someone were slowly painting a nude and yet featureless outline, sketching her edges without filling her in. Lines of white making a reverie; it was through this non-image that anything tangible, or seemingly tangible, appeared.

The girl was bare in that familiar house of white flesh, but this was unremarkable; her hair swarmed her like living black snakes, and there was the ache of vulnerability that was almost its own unnamed aura. She watched this communion of sinners with a passionate eye, the best of spies; she looked endlessly tiny and simple, her small mouth solemn, her expression uncommonly guilty. Only this, this standing, staring child, who had a desire most important and who cared little for the black king. Something of this was demanding. She wanted. Her arm unfurled, and a hand went for the blade; she would have Shadowdancer; she had come for that thing...

...and in the end, it was exceedingly simplistic, that...

...Audmathus would not have this, this fragile creature taking what was his; his face was suddenly transfixed upon the girl, upon the importance of her outstretched, longing arm; he whispered, "look down, songbird" to distract that passionate and degenerate eye, but she had nothing of it, for she wanted the sword; he flung up his hand to grasp her, to push her away from what she would have, and when he touched her, there was a shock of cold flesh and a cruel sense of victory; Audmathus, leering, mocking, arrogant...

...exploded, into a million endlessly tiny and endlessly gory pieces.

And for the smallest second which was like to an eternity, and for a single breath in which there was more stasis than entirely necessary, there was nothing more to speak of than the rain of his flesh, his bones, his blood, and Shadowdancer's agonized screaming.

She came for me, my horrendous Lord...

He stared upon the blade. He, with ragged breath and twisted tumults of silver hair, who owned it, delegated it, who enslaved it -- the aeons-old conscience of a priestess -- to his will. Who, for centuries, had cleaved corpses with her supple body, had driven her deep into the throats of those whose lives mattered not to him. He, who had kept her in the bonds of slavery, had risen to power amidst his own populous with her in his right hand. He, who had sanctified this unholy bond of soul and sword and submission with every life they ended. Audmathus, who bore Shadowdancer, a voice within his brain, a black and parasitic mist in his veins, as if she were some righteous gift from the Lady Chaos Herself.

He enslaved her, and she -- where even Successor Faeryl could not -- spoke to him with seduction.

Tonight, seated within a chair carved of the darkest stone, hidden in the darkness of his laboraties, haloed in shards of glass strewn from shattered decanters and phials, he and Shadowdancer communed, but in vicious ceremony. The Black King was hunched, his face and shoulders curtained in swinging strands of silver, his glistening body wrenching as he twisted the handle of the sword once named Avel further within his own abdomen, driving her deeper, amplifying those words she cooed in his conscience. Blood, thick and rotten and lifeless, was a paint of exquisite pain upon his loins and ribs. He felt her cold pommel kissing the torn skin of his mangled stomach, and though Shadowdancer would drive no deeper, he twisted her, he grimaced, and he thrived upon this material agony.

The girl in whom you have planted half of me, in whom you have combined me with the blood of a demon, wants the rest of me.

"... she cannot have you."

But was it not you, my Lord, who gave me to her? So that I might be birthed again ... so that your Faeryl might have her gift.

"I did."

Then why do you keep me from my rightful owner? You did not keep me from the veins of Altias Bromn, did you? How foolish were you to entrust my will to the gut of a man? And now look at you, my Lord. Her voice chuckled with the disdain of inconsiderate humor even as he hammered a shuddering hand into her hilt and tried to dig her more fitfully into his belly. In the interest of providing your counterpart with a gift ... you are coming apart at the seams. Do you question why your songbird want what remains of me in your hands given to her?

Shuddering hands punctuating his own moist, heaving laughter, he tightened his fists around her curved handle and turned the blade, feeling every ounce of pain as Shadowdancer scraped along age-browned bones and squelched through useless organs.

"You belong," Audmathus gasped, burning eyes blazing, swirling with relentless misdirection. "to me, and only to me!"

No, my Lord, in that ... you are undoubtedly wrong.

"Tell me how I am wrong."

It is not you who enslaves me, Cecinefien Audmathus Xhevus. It is I who controls you.

Suddenly, with a snarl, Audmathus surged forward, throwing himself from the cradle of this stone-slab chair. A black streak of torrid fury exploded from his stomach, ripped free at the whims of strangling knuckles, and Shadowdancer was thrown, like the toy of a furious child, across the length of these laboratories strewn in age-old tomes and jars festering with thick liquid. She spun, screaming out her morbid melody, before she stabbed into the furthest stone wall, hilt shuddering and curls of black mist dancing like lightless fire along her blade.

"Do not speak this ridiculous blasphemy!" Audmathus snarled, stumbling, a series of bloodied fingers streaking across the granite slabs where he once cut and stitched cadavers, studying and curious. Furiously staggering, abdomen gushing, he grappled up a rusted rack of bubbling concoctions and tossed them, in a hurricane of exploding glass, spraying liquid, and rattling metal, across the wall where she had landed. "Do not deny the control that I have over you! You have always done as I request, and you can do nothing but!"

It is a shame, Audmathus. Look at you, stumbling and spitting, bleeding like a wretch. The illithid's tentacles did something to you when you gave yourself to it in front of Helstone, did it not? I never thought you could go any more ... mad. Her ever-present words paused, and Audmathus staggered nearer, his feet gragging gracelessly through rays of shattered crystal, his gaunt features framed in a river of mercury and blood. Look at your hand, Audmathus. What is becoming of you...

At her demand, his teeth tightened near to snapping, he turned his chin downwards and looked upon this shuddering, skeletal appendage. At the tips of each finger there had been gouged holes, as if something had burst from within. Clucking and gurgling beneath the flesh of his knuckles, something slithered.

The tentacles of the illithid still remain, it seems.

"One by one, I am digging them free."

The damage is already done. You are pathetic, Audmathus. Tell me, her voice countered, singing within his addled mind. What your songbird did to you, when she asked for the blade and you pushed her away, it frightened you, did it not?

In this very room, these events had transpired. In his conscience, there were the swirling, clouded masses of conversation, words shared between he and the intruder that had come to him in his rumination -- a woman named Valteri, deft with shadows but foolish with her arrogance -- that held no point but to infuriate one another like rival beasts. They shared words that dared parry back and forth like verbal swords. His attention had been in his glass of wine, hers upon the subject of a Revania Rin`arie and the plague within her belly. And, he remembered, like a summoned follower, the black-haired elf had come on ethereal winds, had thrust forth a hand and demanded from him his precious blade. He had denied her the glory of the other half of Shadowdancer, and he had pushed her hand away.

After that, the world had come back to him in a spiral of sensations: a retching stomach, pores that cried tears of blood, and pain that bit to the core of his undead chest as if he had been torn apart and soddered back together with bits of rough flesh and jagged bone. One moment, he had been pushing the girl away from his beloved sycophant-blade, the next he had awakened across the length of his laboratories, driven to his knees by some unpredictable and unrelenting force of will.

Shadowdancer, at least, was still his, for his demand that his songbird leave had whisked her away as soon as she had come.

As if in rigid defiance of the memories, Audmathus pursed his dried lips and reached out to wrangle his fingers around the handle of the black blade gouged into the wall.

The elven girl is powerful. You did not expect her to retaliate.

"It was a dream, and little more," he countered.

Remind yourself, Audmathus, that I am as knotted in your tangled mind as you are. That was no dream. The pain was real. Revania Rin`arie drove you to your knees and ripped you asunder with her mind, if for a matter of a few agonizing moments. You are losing your touch. The vampire sought you out without question in your own haven, and as if at her mere mention, so did your vicious songbird. You were frightened of Revania's power, just as you are frightened of that many-legged collection of Faeryl's past associates...

Audmathus, his sharpened teeth tightened ferociously, tore Shadowdancer from the stone wall. The powders of dirt and crumbled rock showered the floor around his feet, and he admired her gleaming blade in the ambient light, smoothly running his jittering, seeping fingers along her lines.

You are compromising the .. 'integrity' of your existence, Audmathus. Be aware. Others shall come for you, too, if by shadows or foot.

"You have no faith in my ability," he whispered, kissing the pommel of the sword, feeling her dark presence lick at his cheeks like slithering tongues.

No, my Lord, Shadowdancer hummed in his mind, and this was her final warning, deliberate and foul, ringing with dark and sincere truth. I have no faith in a creature who wishes so selfishly for death. Your time is growing close, Cecinefien Audmathus Xhevus. Forget these presents you have placed in the bellies of infidels. Give your Successor Faeryl a true present, Audmathus.

Give her the Myrken Wood she desires before you die.