Gorp Goes for a Walk
Dead, flat feet struck the smooth cobbles of the streets of WaterDeep’s illustrious guilds district as a dead half-orc grumpily stomped down a war-path of introspection. ‘Idiots.’ He thought. ‘Fools, jokes, the lot of them. I’m the smartest. Prince of minds, chosen of the Lady; but do they listen? No. I will leave them to their follies. When action must be taken then I can act.’ He seethed, glaring at the cowering merchants terrified by his simplest stride. ‘Why do these living fools quake so at the sight of Death? It must come to all of them in time. Perhaps some deserve it sooner rather than later. I could destroy them, this whole weak city would crumble beneath my feet.' The unbidden thought gave the dead guy’s feet pause as he poked at the idea, weighing its measure and worth. He discarded it offhandedly, recognizing that laying waste would take time and that the party already had a new geas they’d bound themselves to. He stood stock still, questioning his role in the party, wondering if he should simply take his little brother and run away, find things more worth killing. Frost formed over his limbs as he pondered, statuesque, plotting his route back to his kin; without the distractions of a living brain to get in the way he retained an internal map of the city in perfect clarity. He had walked to what the masked lords had referred to as the Slums, completely on the opposite end of the city in his furious wanderings. Just then his scouter chirped a shrill warning as a dozen more of the gith assassins his team had so recently thwarted disengaged from the cloying shadows of the slum walls; each held a shimmering silver falchion, their blades somehow reflecting the late afternoon light into a web of shadows and force over the dead guy’s limbs. ‘Excellent’ he thought. ‘Another feeble attempt at immobilizing me? ME? FOOLS! NOW YOU WILL KNOW DEATH!’ He allowed a smirk to cross his face as he broke free of the shadowy bonds, but his bravado faltered when each gith applied their own layer of shadows, the web of force expanding to many fine layers of impenetrable shell, trapping the ego of the revenant. Through the shells he could see the gith assassins layering more bindings over him as still more of the black-clad beasts appeared to begin dragging the furious half-orc into a darker-yet alley of the wicked district. A cold, hissing sound that the dead guy could almost have recognized as laughter (if he’d been alive enough to care) echoed down the narrow and dank walls of the alley. A spark of blue-fire ignited the bowl of a crystalline pipe held in the mouth of an un-masked gith, her face covered in a patchwork of scars from a lifetime of battle. She smiled at the bound knight, her too-sharp teeth curving in disconcerting directions throughout her mouth. “Well well well, when my agents told me they had failed to recover your sword I had the messengers eviscerated out of fury. I had never imagined it would inspire my men enough to bring you to me, my Nyt.” Her words hissed out on icy breaths, their twisted whispers penetrating the layers of binding over the Knight in fractured echoes. The word she called him struck a chord deep within him, but his dead body had no understanding for music. The gith gently brushed her hand over the bindings covering his face and the web of shadows parted as easily as a laced curtain. She stroked the side of his head tenderly, as though familiar with the motion. “Who are you?” he barked, struggling to recoil at the sensation; his body was meant for pain, pleasure played no purpose. Again her chilly hiss of a laugh whispered through the alleyway, taken up in turn by the score of agents cluttering the cramped shadowed space. “My my, am I so forgettable dearest? Let me see if I can’t refresh your memory…” With that she placed her fingers along his skull, the ten scaly points of pressure ice-cold against his deadened skin; she let out a sickly moan of effort as her fingers began to sink through flesh and bone, icy spikes stabbing into the grey matter of the revenant. Silver static clouded the Knight’s vision but no pain found him. Through the static, black words hovered for a moment in his vision, blocky and bold and certainly sent by one Lady. They read “DEAD BRAINS TELL NO TALES, MY KNIGHT” before vanishing from his vision, along with the static. The gith woman’s moans became frantic as she began muttering under her breath, only loud enough for the dead guy to hear. “No no nonono, what’s happening? Why can’t I see? What have you done? No, STOP!” there was the briefest of falling sensations and then Nyt stood on an endless battlefield, ages and eras and scores of millennia’s long spanning an infinite plane of battle. For one joyful moment he believed he stood on the sacred heavenly grounds of his orcish people. He could see orcs engaged in bloody battle, but more than orcs he could see every race he could think of, each in all-out war with an unstoppable legion of Gith. Nyt realized what he was seeing; it was the woman’s plan. In a moment’s thought he understood her goal to bring all-out war to the known universe, siege all known peoples until only the gith were left alive. It was then Nyt saw below the battlefield to a colossal monstrosity below, its ebon tendrils connected to each of the gith, guiding their destruction. Somehow it sensed the Knight’s attention and turned its massive form to face him. When it spoke its voice thundered in the sky, shaking the entire reality Nyt stood upon. “YOU WILL NOT STOP US. WE ARE COMING. YOU WILL ALL DIE.” With that Nyt was blasted backwards, and after another brief sensation of plummeting towards doom he was back in his dead body, the gith’s fingers still buried knuckle-deep into his skull. She recoiled with a shriek as a blast of static shattered the encompassing shadows, her eyes burning in silver fire. Before he could draw his blade her hand lashed out with snake-like speed and seized his tongue between her bony claws. “Ah-ah” she hissed through clenched curled teeth, her free hand covering her still-smoldering eyes. “Can’t have you spoiling my surprise. Nothing will stop the Obsidian Order” Before he could react her hand slashed down from her eyes, slicing through the tough muscle of the tongue with jagged claws. Nyt was aware of a hot ripping motion as his tongue was ripped out of his mouth, curdled blood splatting the rough cobbles at his feet. His vision darkened for a moment at the sudden loss of coagulated blood, and when his eyes settled he was lying on his side among the wet blood-splattered cobbles of the alley, but was otherwise alone. Like with all things since he had Awoken he could remember the vision of the Beast beneath the Battlefield with perfect clarity. He could remember the malice he felt pouring from it into the gith armies. He couldn’t remember who this woman was, however, or how she seemed to know him. The dead guy picked himself up, resolving to find the team and use them as the blunt weapon they were to expunge the secrets of the Obsidian Order and kill the wretched shrew who had stolen his tongue. A strange third option flickered through his head in between 'kill' or 'not kill' which was 'ask'. This new thought was confusing and was quickly filed away for use much later. First however, some shopping would need to occur. It was much easier now that he couldn’t speak he found. He bought some seeds for his new head holes. They would grow to form a crown of black roses, if everything went according to Her plan…