In The Wake of Beasts || The Godfall
Time passes, worshippers lose faith and move on, or are destroyed in the aftermath of a clash with another, greater god's flock. Whatever the reason, The only thing separating the spirits inhabiting The Host and any other dragon is the mysterious control they express over others- and the grand stores of magical energy contained within.
Encore has lost the former, and thusly, Godfall approaches. In Light territory, eager vultures gather to fight and scavenge for the latter- and among them, a pair of deathly harlequins and their young.
[Encore, Pig, Runt, Sow, Whelp, Tooth, Claw, Riot, Ravager, and Rot]
Content Warnings: light gore mentions and I think that's it?
"Any eyes on Runt?"
"No, Papa."
"Mmh. Nothin' we can do for it. Thank you, darlin'. Sow!" The Hewn City is alive with activity, perhaps for the first time in centuries. Simple canvas tents and caravans dot shade-gripped ruins, hundreds of colorful furred, scaled, and feathered bodies populating the campsites and bogged down with armor, weapons- and thousands of empty glass vials strapped across chests of various sizes in thick leather bandoliers. Pig takes a deep breath as he exits the well-worn canvas flaps of the circus tent his family calls home- It's been crowded, lately, seven guardian hatchlings would have filled the space more than capably themselves, but Pig's daughters were hardly babies now, and as the moment they would seek clans of their own rapidly approached- as adolescence faded in eager, red eyes for hardened adulthood, it was maybe coincidence or serendipity that a Godfall would be so soon, and so close to the day Pig had already intended to gift his children their cleavers.
"I am busy." Declared flatly. Sow and Pig were never fond of each other in the way many mated pairs were- in honesty, it was miraculous in itself that they stayed blades long enough to rear children- but the scar-nicked hide of Pig's oft bared chest and the chipped, battered bones of Sow's armor indicated they likely just tended to clash out of earshot while the little ones slept. "Whatever it is you need-"
"Nothin' in the other camps about Runt, just sent Riot to check."
"I will send Dethrone on another fly-"
"You will not. We need your damned bird taking point on this, I've seen too many airborne combatants and not enough herding crews-we're going against a bunch of green hunters with a bunch of green hunters. If I see that banescale leave the path of the fall, I'm having roast bird for dinner." Sow rolls her eyes, glancing over at Dethrone nearby, the banescale growling and snapping at the sisters giggling and biting at his tail.
"Dethrone! I need eyes in the sky. God's dropping from out toward the wake, get some eyes on Luminax, will you? If they're too close when it falls we're going to be fighting with a lot more than just one measly lesser God."
"Yes, yes, of course, anything to get me away from these little menaces you had the great misfortune of laying and your charming better half." he takes a brief running leap, and a detour to make a rude gesture at Pig before he's airborne, black flame trailing behind him until he crests the inky darkness of the sky over the ruins- a handful of similarly sized dragons built for flight joining him a moment later, the sky alight with twisting flame and trailing smoke peeling from the bodies that hosted it within.
"No matter the coverage we have in the air, we're flying blind." It's insisted absently- Whelp polishing the blade of her cleaver and laid nearby outside the family's tent. She'd left home sooner, born alongside Runt earlier than their siblings. "Without any sort of information we-"
"I've hunted dozens of Godfalls without a leg up Whelp, it wasn't the norm, before." Sow insists, sighing as Pig brushes past to ready his bandolier- and several more. "Alright, alright, lecture quickly... You and your tinkering..."
"Hey now, me and my tinkerin' is gonna give the girls that leg up Whelp was worrin' about. C'mere, pups." It's exciting, the promise of the ability to shed the blood of other dragons and things higher above the way their parents do- something promised in combat training when they were barely tall enough to reach Pig's hip. There was always this moment, looming on the horizon, a handmade gift from their father, a wicked, mangling weapon built for slaughter- and the Cleaversworn's art has always been brutality blended with innovation- his own cleaver has seen thousands of iterations and improvements- though it's biting edge remains the very one that called him to kill in the first place.
"You'll load vials like this- don't get greedy, don't overfill 'em- too much raw power drawn in and they'll explode." Skilled claws lock brass wound glass into the divot of a cleaver handle- it sits empty, still unfilled with the magic starting to build in the air around them. "Remember, we're only here to fill up what we've got on hand- not a one of you is to try for any sort of glory or accolades- not on your first fall, and not with The Shatterpack and them freaks from out in Lightnin' running alongside us today, understood? You play it safe, you clash with folk who come after you first, and ride the legs and tail- whatever's spilling through the cracks is gonna be big, slow, and likely won't give half a shit about the little things hackin' away at it, so long as it can't see you. Now, you girls remember what I told ya. Trust nobody out there- even family will turncoat on ya that close to that kind of power- and should any of you elect to do just that, you best be prepared to fight me to the death- got it?"
"Aw, come on papa. You think that little of us?" Tooth questions, eagerly loading bandoliers underneath heavy leather belts and stripped, white bone with vials and checking her stock of smaller knives- never easy to tell when she might need to wake someone up after all.
"If we were going to kill you, old man, we'd have done it as a group while you were napping." Claw insists as she ties up draping jewelry and gold, Riot laughing over her shoulder. "Riiight after lunch, but just before you got so comfortable you covered your soft bits, of course."
"A little dagger between the scales and you wouldn't have even known we'd been there, really." Rot grins- mask quickly tugged into place to cover it once more Pig lets out a dramatic groan, rolling his eyes as Sow hides her laughter beneath brown-cast bone pulled over white-painted features. "We've got your belongings all divided up and everything, too, It'd be clumsy to kill you now."
"Oh, look at them scheming to commit patricide, you are my children... darling girls." Sow coos, fondly leaning to set a kiss against six separate temples, straightening leather straps and twisted weaponry against the girls' frames with the mindful, attentive hands of perhaps a mother far softer and less monstrous than the Stringcutter herself. There was a love among the harlequins, bloodied as it may have been and forged in viscera, there was a knowledge in them all that any one might lay their life down for the others, if the need arose. Pig would spend today ensuring there wouldn't be.
But today was not the fall of a lesser god.
The rumbling of earth and the crack in the darkness cast sky that twinkled like oil in water was common enough, the heralds of the incoming collapse, a funerary service attended only by things desperate to feed.
"THE GODFALL APPROACHES!" It is unclear who bellows it first, across the sea of bodies, hundreds gnawing at the bit to scavenge what would spill through for its parts, for its power. It should open, split open to the remnants of a thing barely clinging to life, the sixteen officiants stood on ruins high above the rest of them, each loyal to a different spirit of The Host should give the signal, that those in attendance are free to pursue their prey- a swath of blackened fire to paint a path through the Hewn City spewed by Dethrone and his fellows to keep the stumbling, dying beast under control.
Instead, the Flamebearer's Priest drops dead the moment the Beholders present finish their opening ceremony declaration. One moment the aberration is stood with grand, flaming scales about their neck, the next, they lie dead, flames snuffed as if all the oxygen surrounding them was sucked away in the time it took them to hit the ground.
It starts as a murmur, the young guardians stopping their preparation to watch the scene with baited breath alongside their parents- Pig's usually capable confidence giving way to confusion- Sow's pensive expression becoming one of wild glee. Eventually, the murmuring among the attendants becomes a low roar, a consensus being made even before the crack in the sky opens completely.
"One of the Sixteen falls today!" "The Flamebearer rots!" "The Eternal Flame lives no more!" "A true God to feed upon!"
"Daddy?" It's Ravager, carefully straightening her locket around her neck and turning her gaze to Pig's own. "What's happening?"
"When the gap in the sky opens, you girls prepare for war." In their time with Pig, they've learned a handful of things, chief among them, that their father doesn't exaggerate.
And as dim, shadowy blue opens in the sky above, the massive form of a Guardian explodes from inside with a great roar- like a parasite clawing its way from within a host and as big as Luminax some distance away, bound in glittering, golden chains. Great braziers hung on massive wings spill ash and dust as they spread wide- and the flames within snuff suddenly- the already darkened streets of the Hewn City below now cast in inky, magical blackness.
"AERIAL CREWS, LIGHT HIM UP!" The command comes quickly from someone in another crew, grand swaths of magical fire suddenly spilling from the sky above, painting the ground below into a runway- Dethrone's pitch-black blaze streaking alongside neon blues, purples, greens and reds- corralling a blind, suffering God into the path of the waiting Thronebreakers.
Encore wails in pain, his power stripping away in waves as he trudges ceaselessly forward- the mirrors of Shatterpack already racing at his heels and tearing away at scales.
"By the Eyeless One..." it's Sow who invokes Pig's goddess at the scene, and he can't even find it in him to be smug about it, because this was not the plan- the girls are not ready for this kind of magical fallout, this kind of entity to fall in their presence.
"Maybe we should-" He's cut off by a wild whoop from behind him- Rot leading the charge of her sisters into the fray ahead with wings outstretched and cleaver primed to steal whatever it might pull from the bodies of opportunistic thronebreakers or the god who's path they now dwelled within. "Rot! Get back here-" His demand falls on deaf ears, they are their father's daughters, after all, and the call of the slaughter would perhaps always outweigh listening to their father. "Lady of the Graves be with me..." He growls, taking up his cleaver and quickly loading a vial.
"You cannot seriously intend to-"
"And let them die, or worse, outdo me? Sow that is one of the Sixteen- we may die before another comes down, am I to simply ignore the opportunity t' put him in a grave?"
"That kind of magic-"
"We did tell them they'd leave their first Godfall changed." Pig reminds, wings unfurling from behind himself, cigarette snuffed under one heavy foot- he pauses- a glimpse of a familiar, tiny form running at the heels of the fallen god. "Besides. We should probably go get our son."
"Our so- RUNT." Sow scowls, loading her own cleaver and pulling her hood over her head. "That boy is going to send me to an early grave..."
"Don't tempt me with a good time, darlin... RUNT!!! That's a big one! Get your sisters some cover, yeah!?" Pig and Sow bear down quickly, surprisingly agile given their large size and statures, Runt glancing up and saluting before whirling on his heels and racing back toward the oncoming horde of Mirrors.
"You need to stop encouraging him to do that, Pig."
"And miss out on the way they scatter? absolutely not." He falls into lockstep with the trudging beast above them- as a chorus of terrified wails and screams spills from Shatterpack behind them, a squall of circus-striped tentacles greedily gathering those slower in their grasp and dragging them back toward the gaping, rotten maw of something that surely once resembled a guardian hatchling, now split into little more than a mouth and twisted claws. "That's my boy!"
"Nobody likes a show off!" one of the sisters bellows as Encore continues his death march- with no sign of slowing- the chase may go on for days, no food or water, simply the hunt and peals of heady, thick magic to sustain those in the God's path.
For some, it's a calling, for others, an addiction. For the young Harlequins, it is their first- and it will change parts of them, completely.