WIP Black Ship Edition: Idira Finds Out
[A strange ship crashes on Leira. Idira's gang wishes to collect its parts for sale // first wip * 2026]
Tagged for WIP Whenever by @aseariel; hope the situation resolves soon and everything will be cool ❤️🩹. Seen that other good people, @amasec and @fourraccoonsinacoat are doing Black Ships, so I thought why, a cool flashmob? Why not put Idira in the blender?
Will eventually be a part of Idira Explores Morrowind thing:
https://www.tumblr.com/ravelsquadespresso/803755524519821312/xmas-wip-other-goodies-game?source=share
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Dragaš bulldozed forward, ignoring the bite of the flying glass motes. Boots grinding shale into powder relentlessly, her bulk was a moving tower against the wind. The leather patch over an empty eye socket had been stitched so many times it was now just a mass of mottled threads. Her good eye — a thing of malice and intent — never left the abyss below.
Lennick trudged after her, breathless, chechesse disheveled, fingers fidgeting with the bone charms at his belt.
“Better leave that thing alone,” he cried against the wind, his voice a papery rasp. “That is a plague ark. I just know it. Its anima gone wrong.”
Dragaš doubled over in a fit of coughing.
“Tainted water and moldy grain ain’t havin’ an anima.” She spat into the wind. “Every ermyn-infested cornstalk is friggin’ plague to you.”
“This is different,” Lennick insisted. “It—”
They crested the ridge, Lennick’s voice momentarily muffled by the sandstorm’s howl.
“—curdles the air.”
This side of the mountain the wind lay quiet. The plain below had been pressed flat, as if a giant fist had pounded it into a thin sheet. The shipwreck sat at its center, a strange void spider flung into a pile of charred sand.
Idira had seen starships before — patchwork rigs crawling in from the void, hulks kept together by the sheer will of their engineering crews. Battered rust buckets, in name and look.
This one looked more like a collection of spires than a ship. Gods Below, it indeed was a collection of spires belonging somewhere in Hladeneč Square, not anywhere on an air- or spaceworthy craft.
“A flyin’ church is here for you, Idira,” Dragaš chuckled. “Taking care of your spiritual needs so you don’t have to. How thoughtful of it.”
Below the spires, vast slabs had sunk deep into the hull, their edges misaligned, undoubtedly because of the impact. Across them sprawled the image of a two-headed flying raptor, wings flung wide. A gesture of protection? Threat? Time and elements showed the thing no kindness, leaving burns and blemishes on the polished metal. Its body was blistered and warped, one head sagging lower than the other, the beaks twisted. The wings were pitted, eaten through in places — this sickly predator had been devoured by the void and unexpected atmospheric entry.
“That thing has big guns,” Lennick said, eyeing the ship warily. “Those niches.”
“Well,” Idira said. “Guns or no, the fall done it in. I don’t see any lights. Looks like the thing has lost its po—”
The rest never made it out.
Along the ship’s flanks, between the ribs of the spires and on smooth metal faces, shapes flared up. A tapestry of lines ignited all at once, geometry precise and deadly. Repeated sixfold marks sunk deep into the ship’s plasteel skin, keen lash snapping through the air, sweeping the plain and beyond.
Her hand came away bloody and the blood carried terror within.
Air thickened and closed around her mouth and nose, leaving just enough room for labored breaths. The universe shrank abruptly, a sheet pulled tight around the body. The Choir cut off mid-presence, erased, sawn away with surgical precision.
Knives sled under her eyelids, intimate and ruthless. Lifted the tissues, pried apart the thoughts, sifted the visions — the skilled hand of a torturer, flipping mental fascia aside, dragging the mind downward.
She staggered, boots skidding on loose shale.
The hexes on the hull drifted closer, burning themselves into her vision.
No purchase. No echo. Just an endless gray mire where the voices and the colors had been a moment before.
“Oh,” she gasped, the sound torn from her. “Oh — no.”
The thing hadn’t lost its power. It had merely waited to pounce.
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Soft pokes for @nusaran @vspin @clevermird @lucheiah @ezfimods @pycnolite @just-another-pigeon @fuchsiareign and anyone who wants :).
