The night was bitterly frigid and it was long after dusk. The waxing moon and her blue child poured silvery light across the landscape. Glistening through the canopy of trees in the deepest part of Elwynn, where Larkdael trudged through the undergrowth and pushed past clawing branches. His strides were rather crass as the leather and steel steps he took ripped at the ground. One dark, gloved hand clenched firmly on the handle of a slightly rusted lantern he happened to acquire for his little stroll. It's amber glow lightly coating his surroundings and giving the extra needed light in the dreary dark of the woods. Finally coming to an end to his self made path as he broke through into a sizable clearing.
His pace slowed, glancing around the glade through the amethyst hued goggles of his mask as he surveyed the moon-lit glade. It was a good spot as any, far away from any sort or civilization as far as he knew and in familiar woods. Lark bent down to place the flickering, oil lantern on the grassy ground by his feet and as he crouched down next to it he took a ragged, leather bound book that had been strapped to his belt. A muffled sigh came from the young man as he opened the book and flipped through it's tattered pages using the flickering flame as a more suitable light source. He obtained it recently from an abandoned hut out on Kul Tiras. Whoever owned it before probably wouldn't miss it and not in the state he had found the home in as it looked as if no one had been there for months. Besides, it was called borrowing.
“This makes no sense…” he muttered with a growl only to himself. Not out of anger but more so out of puzzlement. The grimoire he held had interesting incarnations, runes, spells all seeming to require some form of effort of the caster but then there was this one invocation. It was simple, too easy and only needed one word to be chanted a few times. There were no pages stating the end result, well more so those pages seemed to be missing and had been viciously torn out.
Before even coming here, days earlier he had gone to the library on Dreadscar to see if he could find anything similar. No luck. He had never seen anything like it and clearly he wasn’t the only one. Or they didn’t live long enough to record it, he thought but unphased.
His curiosity was killing him, this subject had been gnawing at the back of his mind for weeks and he was running on little to no sleep because of it. The warlock clapped the book shut as his patience had worn thin and he rose to his feet quickly. He crept forward as he made his way to the center of the glade, fidgeting with the edge of his hood with one hand to check it was in place on his head and the other clasped around that damned book. Leaving the fiery lantern behind him, the moonlight pooled over all the vegetation and himself as he walked away from the golden glow. Lark stopped a fair bit from the actual middle and took a deep breath. He would not need to open the pages again, he memorized one word or perhaps it was a name, it had to be. Either way it was bored into his skull like a sharp nail from how many times he pondered upon it. Was it reckless to perform a ritual so vague all on his own? Of course but it had never once stopped him before. Both of his gloved hands clutched the worn book in a vice like grip.
“Mend’zul, Mend’zul, Mend’zul.” The young man’s voice came, no hesitation to be heard and ending with a light snarl that rattled against his mask. Almost as soon as the last chant left his lips the summoning began.
The once nipping cool night air started to swiftly become humid and Lark could feel it as his clothes tried to stick to his skin. There came stimulation to his other senses as well as the sickeningly sweet smell of citrus came struggling through his gas mask and finally his nose. It was short lived. The once pleasant scent slowly disappeared and was replaced with one of foul rot. This received a low groan from him, even though he had a strong stomach, he was no lover of the stench of rot and mold. Who truly was? His gaze shot toward the forest floor as he saw movement and took a few steps back at what he saw. Watching on as the celestial moonlight now spilled over decay and it was spreading outwards, creeping towards himself and the trees. “Shit…”
Starter for @renardsnoir (I did it yay!)
