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?
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Strong drink
If into your drink you should happen to stare,
and back, from the cup, get an answering glare
as you quaff your refreshment, you'd better beware:
the effects may be more than exciting.
The brew that you drink might have thoughts of its own.
The last one who tried it fell down with a groan;
it felt, so he said, like he'd swallowed a stone;
from his guts came the clangor of fighting.
The internal struggle near tore him in two:
his complexion took on a cerulean hue,
and his actions were slowed as though moving through glue,
and the hair in his nose kept igniting.
and back, from the cup, get an answering glare
as you quaff your refreshment, you'd better beware:
the effects may be more than exciting.
The brew that you drink might have thoughts of its own.
The last one who tried it fell down with a groan;
it felt, so he said, like he'd swallowed a stone;
from his guts came the clangor of fighting.
The internal struggle near tore him in two:
his complexion took on a cerulean hue,
and his actions were slowed as though moving through glue,
and the hair in his nose kept igniting.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Jobs Undone
Click, click. Click, click.
"The last of the lights going off. Power cutting out, circuit by circuit. Or, less accurate, but more poetic, soft shoes, walking on graves.
Those of the ones that died in space. Or the ones who built, even if they could never go out past the atmosphere. Even the people who only kept on dreaming of the future, writing of it, inspiring those that flew, and created the ships that took us out.
We've been told that the task is finished. But nearly everyone - those that flew out into space, the people who hoped, one day, to do so, - knows it isn't. The ones that don't have chosen, since there's no changing things, to accept the lie, so that their broken dreams, with no hope of repair, don't haunt them."
I don't think I shook my head, though the urge was there. But, as both of us knew from experience, going out in space, living in a ship the size of a single room, or a station with as much room as a one man apartment, and having to share it with three other people for months at a time... You have to learn how to read the subtlest bits of body language, so you can defuse or avoid tensions, or you'll end by killing each other, and I could see in his expression that he knew I disagreed somewhere, and wanted to know how.
"Surely no hope of repair is a bit dramatic... Eventually, things will settle, won't they?"
He laughed, then, though there was little enough humor in it, if any, and set a hand on my shoulder.
"Look... Say there are a million people that need to be fed now, or that each plane in the war costs as much as a launch, though the actual numbers are much higher, in both cases. People keep breeding, making more mouths; research continues on better weapons, making them cost more. No matter what gets cut, and how fast, the need grows past what can be paid for, in an exponential progression. You'll never catch up with it, much less get something back. So we've chosen to trap ourselves on this world, and we can't take that back. Nor can we hope that some other country will keep trying for space - after all, with all the increased spending on war we're doing, they have to pay more to keep their defenses up. And I suppose, that, in the end, what we get from making such a choice is fitting - a society dedicated to nothing but feeding its hordes and finding new ways to kill off the rest of the planet."
The conversation pretty much cut off there. The last of the lights had just cut off, and neither of us felt like talking too much anyway. Especially not since the air system went down with them.
"The last of the lights going off. Power cutting out, circuit by circuit. Or, less accurate, but more poetic, soft shoes, walking on graves.
Those of the ones that died in space. Or the ones who built, even if they could never go out past the atmosphere. Even the people who only kept on dreaming of the future, writing of it, inspiring those that flew, and created the ships that took us out.
We've been told that the task is finished. But nearly everyone - those that flew out into space, the people who hoped, one day, to do so, - knows it isn't. The ones that don't have chosen, since there's no changing things, to accept the lie, so that their broken dreams, with no hope of repair, don't haunt them."
I don't think I shook my head, though the urge was there. But, as both of us knew from experience, going out in space, living in a ship the size of a single room, or a station with as much room as a one man apartment, and having to share it with three other people for months at a time... You have to learn how to read the subtlest bits of body language, so you can defuse or avoid tensions, or you'll end by killing each other, and I could see in his expression that he knew I disagreed somewhere, and wanted to know how.
"Surely no hope of repair is a bit dramatic... Eventually, things will settle, won't they?"
He laughed, then, though there was little enough humor in it, if any, and set a hand on my shoulder.
"Look... Say there are a million people that need to be fed now, or that each plane in the war costs as much as a launch, though the actual numbers are much higher, in both cases. People keep breeding, making more mouths; research continues on better weapons, making them cost more. No matter what gets cut, and how fast, the need grows past what can be paid for, in an exponential progression. You'll never catch up with it, much less get something back. So we've chosen to trap ourselves on this world, and we can't take that back. Nor can we hope that some other country will keep trying for space - after all, with all the increased spending on war we're doing, they have to pay more to keep their defenses up. And I suppose, that, in the end, what we get from making such a choice is fitting - a society dedicated to nothing but feeding its hordes and finding new ways to kill off the rest of the planet."
The conversation pretty much cut off there. The last of the lights had just cut off, and neither of us felt like talking too much anyway. Especially not since the air system went down with them.
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