Lynette shivered, sensing the memories beating against her shields. She was well aware of what they were, and she didn't need to see her mentor getting torn apart first-hand; she'd had enough trouble dealing with her own memories, which, gladly, only dealt with finding Nicolen's body, not what had gone before, without that. Especially since such things were hard enough to deal with even when you didn't know the person dying...
Protection from Mnemonic Intrusion:
Type: Witch/Wizard
Level: 6/6
Duration: One hour per level
Range: 100'
One of the well-known dangers of the City of Bells is that, with the amount of magic floating around, almost anything can happen. Such is the case with a Memory Stream. Some events, usually ones with great emotional content - violent death, a wedding, resurrections, or any number of other things - can cause the memories of those experiencing them to bleed into the surroundings, and, unless one is protected somehow, force them to relive the event, as well as giving them the memories as though they truly did so.
This spell provides a barrier to the vast majority of such things, and, if maintained well, by a strong mage, can prevent new ones from forming; as such, it is often kept up over the various slave markets of the City (especially those selling Raviien and Asodelians, due to the circumstances they usually become slaves under, though it's generally considered unnecessary for one specializing in Elves, since the vast majority of them enter into it voluntarily) as well as at each gate.
Tuesday, March 27, 2012
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
The Greenhouse: Fungal Garden
Eventually, having made your slow way through the Garden of the Fallen, the somewhat narcotic effects of the bittersweet funerary herbs having dulled your senses and slowed your steps, you enter a cool cave, with thin wisps of mist swirling through it, and seeming to settle into your clothes, the damp, still, air a welcome cure for your half-drugged state.
Looking about, now that your vision has adapted to the dim light, you seem to have walked into yet another tomb; there are bodies set in shallow pools throughout the room, or in the wall niches that feed them through swift, though thin, waterfalls, slowly, though faster than one might expect, having a layer of stone form over them, their decay slowed by the water's preservative properties.
Carefully advancing further into the caverns, you find that the next chamber is where the bodies are placed after having been removed from the water; on narrow stone platforms around the periphery of the chamber, with a few fashioned from massive, still living, grey-spotted white mushrooms set closer to the center, apparent statues rest, green-glowing lichens having been enticed to grow over them, as well as, in some cases, red-hued mushrooms with narrow, pointed, caps, giving off faint light of their own. From the ceiling, almost like the many-stranded bead curtains seen in the City of Bells, hang the mycelia of numerous purple-tinted mushrooms, with three-tiered heads, which are set upside-down on the roof, and also, as is everything in this place, it seems - including their mycelium, which emit a cold, but pleasant blue light - glowing.
Tending the fungi are more of the mirror-skinned people from the Garden of the Fallen; possibly their kind are simply the owners of this strange building, or perhaps their race has been assigned the caste of dealing with the dead. In either case, they seem to be reasonably expert at their tasks, carefully spreading fertilizer, of various types, where it is desired that a certain type of fungi grow, and carefully, patiently, scraping it away where another, or none, should be.
Looking about, now that your vision has adapted to the dim light, you seem to have walked into yet another tomb; there are bodies set in shallow pools throughout the room, or in the wall niches that feed them through swift, though thin, waterfalls, slowly, though faster than one might expect, having a layer of stone form over them, their decay slowed by the water's preservative properties.
Carefully advancing further into the caverns, you find that the next chamber is where the bodies are placed after having been removed from the water; on narrow stone platforms around the periphery of the chamber, with a few fashioned from massive, still living, grey-spotted white mushrooms set closer to the center, apparent statues rest, green-glowing lichens having been enticed to grow over them, as well as, in some cases, red-hued mushrooms with narrow, pointed, caps, giving off faint light of their own. From the ceiling, almost like the many-stranded bead curtains seen in the City of Bells, hang the mycelia of numerous purple-tinted mushrooms, with three-tiered heads, which are set upside-down on the roof, and also, as is everything in this place, it seems - including their mycelium, which emit a cold, but pleasant blue light - glowing.
Tending the fungi are more of the mirror-skinned people from the Garden of the Fallen; possibly their kind are simply the owners of this strange building, or perhaps their race has been assigned the caste of dealing with the dead. In either case, they seem to be reasonably expert at their tasks, carefully spreading fertilizer, of various types, where it is desired that a certain type of fungi grow, and carefully, patiently, scraping it away where another, or none, should be.
Grave Undertakings
The creature looked at the coffin thoughtfully, considering the problem posed by the body inside. More specifically, by the fact that the burial was going to be, at the sudden request of the family, conducted two days earlier than the traditional waiting period.
Were the gravedigger what he appeared, this would have posed no difficulty. Had there not been time on the day they wished the body buried, the request would have been politely turned down. But, despite all appearances, the creature responsible for burying it was not a human man, or human at all, though it had been once. What lifted the lid of the coffin, revealing the occupant to have been a pretty girl, were not muscles, but a mass of worms inhabiting a dead man's skin, having bored their way into his coffin a day or two ago, in another cemetery.
Slowly, it nodded. Yes... This one would do. While the girl had been preserved too well for the process to take anything less than the three days it had originally planned to have, and the alchemical agents in her flesh would slow, and in some cases even prevent, the worms' eggs hatching, and make the muscles less nourishing for those that did, and there was not enough time for her to awaken on the surface, or for it to hide her body, as the death-keeper would be coming to check on the grave's progress long before it could carry the corpse away, return, and dig the grave, it was still possible for her to return in the casket, and break free of its confines, at least if it dug a shallow grave.
Leaning over the coffin, it pried open the dead girl's mouth, just as the the worms began to spill from its lips, falling into her throat and on her face with soft plopping sounds.
That done, it replaced the lid of the coffin, and stood, pushing its shovel deep into the ground. In a few days, the girl would wake, and go to the other cemetery, the one the former man had been buried in, to get a job preparing corpses for burial. And in a few days more, when a suitable body came along, she would be joined by another, who would get a job as a gravedigger, that the bodies the girl planted the worms in would not be killed if they awoke on the surface, and her found out, or be planted too deep for escape if they had not yet returned before being buried.
Were the gravedigger what he appeared, this would have posed no difficulty. Had there not been time on the day they wished the body buried, the request would have been politely turned down. But, despite all appearances, the creature responsible for burying it was not a human man, or human at all, though it had been once. What lifted the lid of the coffin, revealing the occupant to have been a pretty girl, were not muscles, but a mass of worms inhabiting a dead man's skin, having bored their way into his coffin a day or two ago, in another cemetery.
Slowly, it nodded. Yes... This one would do. While the girl had been preserved too well for the process to take anything less than the three days it had originally planned to have, and the alchemical agents in her flesh would slow, and in some cases even prevent, the worms' eggs hatching, and make the muscles less nourishing for those that did, and there was not enough time for her to awaken on the surface, or for it to hide her body, as the death-keeper would be coming to check on the grave's progress long before it could carry the corpse away, return, and dig the grave, it was still possible for her to return in the casket, and break free of its confines, at least if it dug a shallow grave.
Leaning over the coffin, it pried open the dead girl's mouth, just as the the worms began to spill from its lips, falling into her throat and on her face with soft plopping sounds.
That done, it replaced the lid of the coffin, and stood, pushing its shovel deep into the ground. In a few days, the girl would wake, and go to the other cemetery, the one the former man had been buried in, to get a job preparing corpses for burial. And in a few days more, when a suitable body came along, she would be joined by another, who would get a job as a gravedigger, that the bodies the girl planted the worms in would not be killed if they awoke on the surface, and her found out, or be planted too deep for escape if they had not yet returned before being buried.
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Flash Fearday
Flash Fearsday is a microfiction challenge: write a horror story in 140 characters or less. If you feel that is too limiting, you can try for 140 words. Flash Fearsday was started at Porky's Expanse!; however, Porky was unable to continue hosting it, at which point it moved here. What will you create for the challenge?
Monday, March 12, 2012
Flash Fearsfardelayed
And, yet again, I'm two weeks behind on this... I would blame it on having a memory roughly equivalent to a steel sieve, but honestly, that's not at all fair to steel sieves... It's more like a mud sieve, dissolving when you try to run anything through it.
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Flash Fearsday is a microfiction challenge: write a horror story in 140 characters or less. If you feel that is too limiting, you can try for 140 words. Flash Fearsday was started at Porky's Expanse!; however, Porky was unable to continue hosting it, at which point it moved here. What will you create for the challenge?
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Flash Fearsday is a microfiction challenge: write a horror story in 140 characters or less. If you feel that is too limiting, you can try for 140 words. Flash Fearsday was started at Porky's Expanse!; however, Porky was unable to continue hosting it, at which point it moved here. What will you create for the challenge?
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