Acorn on 14/5/2005 at 21:59

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{OOC: I want to read a little more before I add any advancements, too many threads here. I think we should consolidate the group back together just for the sake of keeping the story coherent. As coherent as possible. I see Oneiros has to leave, what about the rest? Orson? Oliver? I want to send everybody else to the keep.}

Acorn on 14/5/2005 at 22:05

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If we take it down to two or three subplots it should be easier for the remaining two of us to handle.

Acorn on 19/5/2005 at 10:23

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More sounds assaulted the ears of the two men. This time included was the familiar ring of steel on steel. "Explanations must come later. Now is the time for battle and the great acts of mortal man." Oliver hefted his flamberg and struck off resolutely in the direction from which the chill laugh, and now sounds of battle echoed.
Conflicted, the thief silently watched his armored companion rush away to battle. Then Garrett tugged his boot back on and stood stamping his foot lightly on the ground as much to shake the remaining ache from his knee ligaments as to settle his foot back into the boot. Without weapons or his usual bag of tricks the thief paced a short length up the road in thought. He needed to reasses his position in the grand scheme before he took any side in any war, if at all; Warfare not being the natural forte of thieves.
Those other two who were proported to be his enemies had appeared off balance and unprepaired at Garrett's attack. Surprised even to find him doing so.
Now this new strangely familiar face steps in and helps him--here on the North road--making the same claim of membership in some traveling fraternity with the thief who never traveled far from his City. The man's horse, he noticed dead not far away. Its hoof prints deeply embossed in the weathered hard packed dirt led from the North. Not a recent traveling companion of the Pagan witch and Keeper then. Having grown up on the street, Garrett knew how to run a Con job. Work the lie until it sounded like it couldn't be anything else but truth. But for this many people to be in on the desception, people who had been disconnected from each other in the recent events as he had understood them, was patently impossible. Whatever he'd thought he knew, he knew now that he did not know the truth.

{OOC: hahaha. :cheeky: }

An arrow plunked dully into the dirt at Garrett's feet and he stepped back into the shadow clothed treeline. The thief snorted with chagrine to be caught off guard by a shambling undead weilding its bow with the characteristic lumbering butterfingered clumseyness of its kind.
He hadn't been himself lately.
"Apparently that's an understatement." Garrett whispered bemused and looked about for a weapon. His copse of trees stood amid a pile of their own cast off branches from previous summers. There really was nothing else there, other than pinecones... Bending to pick up a thick branch the thief quickly lost all equilibrium. His annoying affliction was still stubbornly in residence within the thief's head, and appeared to intend further manifestations. The thief straightened panting, a fine sheen of sweat sprouting wetly across his face, the crude cudgel clutched in trembling hands dug deeply into the ground supporting his weight.
"Have to get over this." Garrett swallowed dryly and squinted back over his shoulder. Only trees and more trees greeted his vision, skewing and stretching sickeningly like trees tend not to do. Then the pale yellow of the road misted up through the trippled image and remained, rippling like a heat mirage. Garrett blinked. Shifting trees morphed and congealed into shifting spider legs attached to something horrible just above his vision--no! that was a memory... *Blink*Blink* Trees now, regular and solid. Then, only one thing moved.
His zombie was quickly dispatched, its head knocked off with the well aimed swing of a heavy branch. Garrett dropped the broken branch and shrugged into the undead's dirty quiver, then took a few minutes to wipe the zombie's bow a bit cleaner on it's filthy tunic. His bearings were returning to the thief again as his sight cleared. This time sans throbbing headache.

======================

"This is getting rediculous!" Acorn shouted to Kestril through the chaos and cacophany of battle.
"What?" Kestril replied, busy with his own sporadic combat polishing off those who stumbled through Oneiros' savage defence. The resurected wizard was evidently enjoying the exorsize though and continued to reap great swaths of zombie flesh from the ragged enemy ranks.
"I said We can't keep this up much longer!" Acorn added at the end of her next incantation.
Kestril grimaced and continued to artfully dodge and pary. This fight was not what he needed after Garrett had tried to tear a hole in him. If things didn't break in their favor soon, they would both go down leaving only the oblivious wizard to his seemingly mindless and unending bloodletting.
He noticed Frob darting through the shadows into and out of the frey. Sometimes the elder vampire appeared from the above branches of a tree and hauled a squirming thing up into the boughs, its unmoving body dropping from the foliage a minute later. Then Keeper Orson was at Kestril's back weilding his own magic blade. If only they were many...

Oneiroscope on 26/5/2005 at 03:53

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Blown by a sudden shift in the ever present breeze, the warm stench of rot, sickly sweet and dark, stabbed into Acorn’s nostrils. A wave of nausea broke her concentration and the spell she had been casting swirled out of her control. Thankfully, Kestril stepped to one side at that moment to lunge at an undead wielding a halberd. Otherwise the Keeper would have been consumed by the catastrophic flames that bellowed from the woodsie witch’s flailing hand.

As it was, the flames merely cannoned over the heads of the front rank of the zombies and into the dark drizzling sky. Acorn was grateful. But not for long. For her wild spell had failed to destroy the zombie that had now marked her skull to receive the full force of its battered flail. It moaned in triumph as the downward arc began. Acorn gave ground in panic, slipping in the mud and falling into a pool of ichors. Nausea again claimed her. Born both of the horrors floating near her, and the sick certainty that soon she would be possessed by the Skollus Stone, enemy of all things.

As another zombie approached, a gleeful smile on its tattered face and a farmer’s pitchfork aimed at Acorn’s belly, a shadow passed over her with a fluttering of Keeper’s robes. Orson. He barreled into the zombie, enchanted blade first slashing the pitchfork in twain, then removing the undead’s head in a simple backstroke so quick as to seem almost invisible. He turned and shouted something to Acorn, but his words were lost in the primal howl that then arose from the dead. The Keeper’s chest bloomed scarlet. The ballista’s bolt passed cleanly through Orson and sailed over Acorn, trailing a mist of the Keeper’s blood that rained down on her shocked face.

Orson stood, a puzzled expression on his face. He touched the great hole in his chest, raised his hand and saw the bright blood in the light of the wizard’s hellfire. He looked again at Acorn. A stony resolve made his dying face a mask. He took a step toward her. Then another. He carefully mouthed the words: Run, Oneiros says run. Then the Keeper fell to his knees. A zombie behind him sank its spear, a simple hunter’s weapon, into the Keeper’s neck. Finally Orson went down.

Acorn was frozen. Suddenly Kestril appeared and hauled her up to her feet. He pulled her at a quick pace back to the standing stones.

“I think whatever Oneiros was waiting for has happened,” he panted. “Best we were on our way.”

Acorn was still speechless. Orson’s blood was wet on her cheeks. She mutely watched as Kestril gathered up Amelie’s unconscious body. Molly simply sat and watched the battle. A terrible, detached, vacant expression on the child’s face. The girl’s eyes scanned the carnage without emotion. As might a collector view her impaled butterfies. Acorn turned and followed the child’s gaze. The sight was impressive enough.

The zombies had forgotten them, it seemed. All of their attentions were now on the mad wizard howling and capering in their midst. Awful energies were at work around Oneiros. Acorn could sense only two of them. The blade he had made from the Thing within Amelie left a spidery tracing of magic behind, a lingering scent of Fire, Water, Air, and Earth that mingled with the open grave of Death. There was more there, Acorn knew. The power was phenomenal. He was even now using each stroke of the blade to weave a web of all Five Magics. Something tremendous was going to happen here. Something cataclysmic. It would be safest to be very far away indeed.

Frobert appeared. “Time to leave! I saw one of that Things liches approach from the South! We must depart, niece!” The vampire grabbed her up and made to leave as quickly as possible.

“Wait! The little girl! We can’t leave her here!” Acorn yelled into her uncle’s ear. Damnation! She hated being… MANHANDLED this way! She could move just fine on her own, thank you very much!

Frobert heeded her and stooped to gather up Molly. As he neared her, however, the girl turned and fixed him with a rictus grin that sent shivers down Acorn’s spine. She had seen that somewhere before. Fern. Her young face a rigid mask of hate as she grabbed for the Eye. Suddenly lightning blossomed all over Frob, he dropped Acorn. Both of them lay jerking on the ground from the massive shock that had passed through them both at Molly’s touch.

Acorn found herself conscious, but paralyzed. All she could see was the sodden turf an inch before her face. Small hands took hold of her with a strength at was irresistable. Acorn found herself propped up against the standing stone. Molly then gently shifted the woodsie witch's head until she could easily see the battle.

A voice bleak and dry echoed from Molly‘s throat. “Watch now, witch. Watch as I claim this fool of fools for the Stone. While he struggles and works his mighty magic against our army and against Leaf, I shall find his mind unguarded. He will be ours. Watch now, little witch. The end now comes.”
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Levent, or more properly the thing once known as Levent, reeled aimlessly in the woods. Its vision was a black ocean. The dead, poisoned blood in its belly filled its mind with a dead miasma of unholy hunger and animal rage. It wandered, lost. Sometimes it saw shaped moving nearby. At the merest hint of movement, the monstrous vampire would blindly pounce and feed. Each time, no reward was to be had. It heard something laughing at it.

But through its agony and delerium, it saw only for a moment a figure that breathed purpose into its rage, fire into its hunger. A still form that sat and stared south. And to the south was something else. Something that it had to do. Something even more important than the Hunger. The moment was lost, and again the creature fell upon something that moved too close. Again, no nectar on its tongue. They were leading it away from the watcher, came a stray lucid thought that then drowned in black blood.

EDIT: {OOC: Acorn, let me know if you would rather you character not be a captive audience here. I seem to keep doing that to yours and littlek's characters! If you'd rather, maybe I could have her get away and join up with Garret and Oliver, or stick it out and try to help Oneiros. Or maybe the "paralysis" won't last long because she can out Woodsie Witch it or something. :p }

Oneiroscope on 30/5/2005 at 03:37

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{OOC: Feel free to try any ideas you have. Molly isn't really a major character as far as I'm concerned, though I might feel better if nothing too terminal happened. Then again... might make for some interesting angst for someone. "Oh how could I have done it, she was just a kid! *sob* ":devil: }

EDIT: I haven't forgotten Ollie. Just not sure how to incorporate him into the fracas yet.