Outside the Cycle - Act V

Yep, laptop still broken and my files were unrecoverable so I had to start again. Really sorry for the long wait, couldn't be helped.

In this Act the plot takes a darker turn as the Heroes find what they were looking for, and Arash moves one step closer to his dark destiny. For added effect, listen to this with some creepy orchestral music in the background. Probably by Two Steps From Hell. Mmm.

The steady rocking of the caravan over the ground suddenly changed to a jagged series of bumps and jolts that quickly woke Lanaya. Grimacing at her aching muscles, she staggered upright as best she could. Abaddon and Dragonus still slept, but she sensed them stirring.

Act V: The Black Rook

She moved to the compartment at the front, where Arash was steering the horses. They'd moved off the road and onto overland terrain - they were somewhere in the highlands.

"I thought Abaddon wouldn't let anyone touch his horses," she opened. Arash shrugged.

"He was tired, and I wasn't."

"How much did you sleep?"

"I didn't."

She raised an eyebrow at him, and he gave her an apologetic smile. "We're nearly there."

Lanaya squinted at the distance, seeing a large mass rising above the rocky highlands. A tower? It loomed imposingly, towering over all else on the horizon. From here, she could just make out a fog surrounding the place that enclosed it in eternal night.

"What is that place?" she asked.

"It is called Vo'hollom Domosh - a tower created in ages past when demons walked the earth," Arash explained. "It is here that the last King met his end, when the people rose against his madness and dark bargains that ruled them. The place is damned many times over."

"I've never heard of it," she murmured.

Dragonus, emerging, interjected. "You may know it by its other name - the Black Rook. I suspected you'd bring us here, Psychomancer."

He smiled humourlessly. "Whatever else it may be, the tower is a veritable fountain of archaic knowledge."

"How do you know so much about it?" Lanaya asked.

"I've been here before," he said, eyes blazing with a dark flame. "It is here that I confronted the sorcerer that led me on my dark descent. It is here that I lost my soul, here that I became what I am today."

She didn't really have anything to say to that.

"I sense energies emanating from the Rook," Dragonus informed. Now that she concentrated on it, Lanaya too sensed a disturbance in the natural order from the place. "We daren't go much closer."

"I wouldn't walk through the front gate, either, if it can be avoided," the Templar Assassin added. "Is there another entrance?"

Arash nodded. "There are crypts nearby. What purpose they served to Vo'hollom's demonic creators, I know not, but if there is some new force in the tower, then they are our best entrance."

"What could have taken residence there?" Abaddon queried.

"Any number of things," the Skywrath Mage said. "The last inhabitant of the tower was summoning demons, but I sense there is some other force at play here."

They entered the field of fog around the Black Rook, and the morning sun faded to twilight grey. Darkness enveloped the company.

"Here is as far as we take the carriage," Arash said, deadly soft, his words like velvet over a blade. "I know the way from here."

In one fluid motion, he dismounted, followed by the others. The only sound that pierced the silence was their footfalls on the path to the tower. Arash gestured to the left when they reached a fork in the road. It led away from the tower, into a forest of dead trees. Something about the way the blackened branches reached into the air reminded Lanaya of damned souls imploring a higher power for deliverance. She didn't like the image.

A short way into the forest, the trees parted to reveal a small clearing. From the centre of the clearing a mausoleum rose ominously. It was small, but exuded an air of menace that chilled the group to the bone. The entrance to the crypts was a yawning chasm of obsidian where the light died at the door.

"What are we waiting for?" Abaddon asked. He strode forward before being swallowed by the darkness.

Arash frowned, and followed him, dispersing as well into the shadows. Lanaya and Dragonus went in together. The interior was pitch black, but far below, at the bottom of a massive staircase, a tiny flicker indicated there was light at the bottom of the abyss. Abaddon and Arash were already striding towards it, and Lanaya hurried to catch up to them. It was achingly cold, fingers of frost caressing her to the bone, and she swore she could hear the sound of shallow breathing - but that may have been her own gasps echoing off the walls.

The group seemed even smaller and insignificant as they drew close to the bottom of the stairs. Dragonus drew breath to speak, but a harsh gesture from Arash silenced the words before they were spoken.

"Listen," the Psychomancer whispered, barely audible. Lanaya strained her ears, and heard... voices. Whispering. None of the four Heroes. Abaddon drew his runeblade, the dim flicker of the runes a bright illumination that pierced the consuming darkness.

The stairs finally ended, and the room that confronted them was titanic and burnt with torches and braziers set across the walls. Misshapen statues, life-sized, were the only occupants and were set in haphazard places. Their poses were grotesque, and a primal terror shrouded over Lanaya. Here were things mortals could not understand. She looked at her companions to see their reaction, and even Dragonus seemed a shade paler.

They entered the room. Lanaya bit back a gasp as she saw one of the statues hanging from the roof by a collar around its neck - it wasn't so much the position, but the fact that the head was orientated to the ground and the feet pointed up at the ceiling. It was then she realised that the dark caricatures had no faces, only hollow impressions.

"What are these things?" she asked. For once, Arash was clueless.

They passed more statues - some in poses of agony, others covering their formless eyes with hands, and still others bent into unnatural positions. Lanaya frowned. Something was nagging at the back of her mind of something important she was missing, but she didn't know what.

When Arash leant over one of the statues to have a closer look, she realised.

The statues had two shadows.

She nudged Dragonus urgently, He glanced down at her, and followed her nod towards the floor. Alarmed, he whirled around, to see a shadow from a figure behind him grasping towards him.

Arash suddenly recoiled, letting out an uncharacteristic yelp. Lanaya looked at the statue he had been inspecting to see that its face was taking on the Psychomancer's features, twisted into a mad grin from even a demon's nightmares.

"We leave. NOW!" he yelled, gesturing to the opposite side of the room. The four dashed, dodging past statues and grasping shadows. The omnipresent voices rose in volume to peak at a maddening shriek. The Templar Assassin recognised one sentence, rising above the cacophony.

Have you had the dream again?

And finally, they reached the end, bursting through the other door. The shadows shrank back, and the voices abated with a soft chuckle.

Shaken, Lanaya turned to Dragonus. "What the **** was that?!"

Arash answered, his voice but a shadow itself. For a moment, he sounded like a human again, scared and confused. "Those... those were the sinners. The last of the group that went with the Mad King Archronicus to this tower all those years ago. The demons they summoned, it seemed, had a game with them."

"Should we break the statues? Put them out of their misery?" Dragonus asked softly.

"They damn nearly killed us, even imprisoned. If we went back in there, they would take us, and we would join the ranks of the sinners."

"Then we move on," Abaddon said. "The tower proper should be near, it cannot possibly be worse than what we just passed through."

"Don't say that," Arash warned.
_________________

After the endless whispers of the crypts, the eerie silence of Vo'hollom Domosh was compounded and multiplied.

The place was just as Arash remembered. The grey stone walls featured stained glass windows that let in little of the deep twilight the tower was surrounded by, the marble floors bearing faded carpets in royal colours, mimicking the great halls of ancient lords. Fluted columns reached from floor to ceiling, titanic and imposing. As it had previously, the scale of the place was disconcerting, as if Vo'hollom Domosh were built by men half the size again of today's people. The roof itself, if one looked up, was a mosaic styled on the night sky, but a sky alien to the present. The Mad Moon was clearly recognisable, bright as a dual sun burning gold and red. Constellations lost to the ages were visible. The ceiling itself was more than enough to affirm to a casual visitor the age of the tower, if any casual visitor were foolish enough to come within a league of it.

Yet as the four ascended past the first level, things changed that Arash did not know of. Many of the doors that had been locked were now open, revealing twisting corridors and looming statues nearly touching the ceiling. They reminded Arash of the crypts, and he had to stop himself from shivering.

"It seems quiet," Lanaya noticed. "Perhaps there is nothing here?"

Arash shook his head solemnly. "Not a chance of that. These doors are opened recently."

Dragonus reached out a hand, sliding a finger along the wall before drawing it back and inspecting it with a frown. He showed the other three.

"Some form of fluid, I do not know what," he explained. Arash looked closer. The fluid was translucent, green, but tinted with red. It looked somewhat acidic.

"It's come from the landing above," Abaddon stated, pointing to the ceiling where it joined the wall. Sure enough, a tiny trickle of the liquid was trailing down. Arash flexed his taloned gauntlet and strode purposefully up the tower's stairwell. Behind him, Abaddon pointed the Avernal runeblade at him. A shield of mist surrounded him, swirling close and protectively.

Arash quietly opened the door, and a foul stench of decay and blood filled his nostrils. He recoiled instinctively before walking in and getting his first view of the scene.

Across the walls, chrysalises were lined, each of them occupied by a screaming human. Headless ghouls wandered around, somehow knowing where they were going. The haphazard laboratory had more than just people, though - tables occupied much of the remaining space, overflowing with wires, cords and mechanical parts. As he watched, one of the creatures shambled over to a chrysalis, and casually ripped the head off of one of the humans before casting it onto a table, ignoring the spray of blood that splattered the floor.

He didn't have long to take this in, though, as one of the ghouls noticed him. With a speed that belied its decapitated nature, it lurched towards him, one bloodstained hand grasping towards him. Arash whirled underneath the appendage, gauntlet ripping through its torso. Instead of blood, more of the vile fluid they had found below erupted out. The Avernal shield broke, and the broken body of the ghoul flew away to crash into a wall before vanishing into a green smear.

"In here! Now!" he shouted to his companions before leaping into action. The voices of the tormented begged for release, but Arash forced himself to ignore them and instead focused on the undead abominations.

Abaddon was the first in, his blade sweeping down in a titanic arc that split a ghoul in two. A bolt of arcane energy slammed into another, and Lanaya blinked into being above one of the tables. The ghouls posed no challenge, and soon the room was cleared.

The screaming of the victims had stopped. Lanaya looked at one, checking his pulse, and shook her head.

"He's dead, but there is no reason why. It's as if they were just... turned off."

Arash was preoccupied with the contents of one of the tables. "There are many different body parts here... some stitched together, or connected by wires. They were building something from people."

He could have sworn Dragonus shuddered. "I'm glad we stopped it, but it beggars more questions than it answers. Chief among them is why, but also who? Who is doing this?"

"I fear we will find out soon," Lanaya growled.

And so they left the landing, heading ever upwards. Arash paused one last time to look back at the bloodstained room, the sickening experiments on the table, the headless ghouls, the silent bodies in their chrysalises, and for the first time in years wondered what the point could possibly be.