Black Magus

High Priestess Nym Za'Darmondiel.

1st Daughter of the High Matron's 2nd Daughter, High Priestess Yela Za'Darmondiel.

9th of Quartutus, 1492.

22:17.

***

The High Matron telling us to gain intelligence regarding Elg-Horr's troupe was not what bothered me. In any time or era, I would have jumped at the slightest chance of being a part of the greatest moment of elven history since the Rending. My problem came from our High Matron instructing me to talk to the dirty elf above all the others. I would have preferred the goblin, and yet death by a thousand cuts would have been preferable to displeasing High Matron Etyl Za'Darmondiel. As stalactites fall, my younger siblings and my children would have preferred death by a million bites before even thinking of displeasing me.

With all my ramblings, though, I still saw the High Matron's wisdom. And so, while my bumbling brothers approached the little girl, I gave a silent prayer. Then gave more words of praise to our Goddess once my eyes burned red, pitting the mundane chamber in a field of black, speckled and spotted with gold amongst a gaseous web of violet. It all poured off of this little elf girl. Twilight, it was called. That energy of light and darkness in tandem was used by the cunning Felipian meditating in the distant chambers. Hers, however, was purely divine, and it was not given to her by her clerical class. Such was the case for all of them and their dissimilar abilities. They were all divine. Demigods or higher; some, wickedly so. But only she and the… machine woman were this potent.

Where Ilar's little Aufa failed to learn of Elg-Horr's guild from the omni-elemental monk and of Iris, I would succeed in learning more of this twilight. That was no matter of belief. It was a simple truth. Ironically so, for it was the truth that would get us what we wanted; the High Matron, and by extension I understood that well enough.

"Little Aufa seems to have stricken a nerve with Lady Iris. She is young. Hardly older than yourself, being at the dawn of her second decade. Next year will mark the dawn of my third century. So, unlike her, I shall come to you with candor. What makes you and her different from the rest of his troupe?"

She turned to me, smiling and humming as if she were singing in the woods. Or so I first thought until I heard the dreary mood of her song and, more, saw her delightfully unsettling visage. Wrapped in a feathered robe and cowl, she sat in a dignified, almost matronly manner. Yet her head was anything but. Her hair was entangled with braids, feathers, leaves, and other such nonsense. Her skin was tan like the forest elves, yet gaunt and textured somewhat like polished ceramic along the brow, neck, and cheekbones, allowing her blackened veins to show through.

"Oh, don't mind Iris." She hummed creepily. "She woke up on the wrong side of the bed, as they say. A lot is going on in her mind. It isn't personal."

"I assure you, I do not care. My interest is in you, Reina Featherfall."

"Oh, I'll tell you all about myself, High Priestess Nym!" She turned to face me fully, smiling bright and wide with a sickening radiance. "I'm the undying survivor of the Redagh's Feathered Grove. I'm sure you've heard about the Blighted Woods?"

"Created by the Raven Reaper herself." I nodded, ignoring her use of my name and title.

"Yes!" She giggled creepily. "I ventured there often as a little girl. It… cursed me, or whatever. But not before Amun's presence caused the druids to panic. My grove was one of those who was so afraid of what he would bring that they went mad!" She giggled again. "So, with my curse, the head druid banished me. I cursed them as I went. The Head Druid. My parents. The entire grove. That was enough for my lovely parents to hunt me down the next morning."

It was music to my ears. "And you surface elves are said to be peaceful."

"Mmm." She nodded, humming as if she fully agreed. "They're right over there!" Pointing over her shoulder, she brought my eyes to two beings of pure darkness and arcana standing on either side of a zombie brimming with holy energy; all reacting as any other surface elves would, sneering at me in fearful contempt; and at Reina with disgusted disapproval.

"Magnificent!" I snarled in delight. "You and your progenitors are to haunt each other until the end of your undying days. It is the perfect curse for you! I knew the Destroyer would not disappoint. Being the night devil that he is, his tales of goodness floating above could have only been a mask for his wickedness. And he is wicked, indeed."

"Mhm." She hummed in agreement. "My father, there, wrapped a rope around me while my mother egged him on. The other end was tied to a tree, and, and I was pushed over the edge, but I didn't hang. My momentum swung me into the cliff side, and then the rope snapped. The fall killed me. But that was after I made my pact." She said with a wicked grin. "I awoke to find a parliament of owls had captured the druids. It was the happiest moment of my life, killing you." She smiled at the eleven man of darkness.

Ashamed, her father turned away from his putrid gaze while his slate fingers rubbed the glowing scar on his throat.

"I went on to kill every man, woman, child, and elder in the forest before I killed the head druid and claimed the relics of the Feathered Grove." She gestured to the feathered cowl enveloping her. "I saved my dearest mother for last, then set the grove aflame before leaving. Yet, I stopped at the borders to dance and laugh and sing in ritual; and therein I learned of my blessed pact. Twilight is the power of duality, you see. So, as my druid craft was blessed to purify nature." She said, spawning violet brambles to wrap around her fingers and bloom into pestilent warts and lesions. "So too has it been cursed to corrupt life."

"Do these… spread disease?" My little sister, Priestess Shaenya, rightly asked.

"They can with my magic." Reina carelessly shrugged. "This particular one does not."

"Then what is the point?"

"To process flesh." The druid cheerfully smiled. "I am the Flesh Mother, after all. I manufacture life."

"You manufacture creatures? Explain." I demanded.

"Oh, well, when I left Redagh, I met Amun and went to his realm for… what, two or three years? It was only a few days for you all, though."

"You're saying the Destroyer has aged two years in his absence?"

"Oh, he's aged much longer; mentally. At least seven, raising Iris, but he taught us all his secrets." She said with shrewd smugness. "He taught me the origins of life born outside the divine trees and how to tinker with it. I learned how to manipulate the genes of living creatures and to create new ones, and now that I have my affinities." She chuckled. "Well, I can give life to anything."

"Explain," I demanded, waving some slaves forward. "Give us a demonstration."

Ever eager to avoid pain, an ogre came rumbling forward to meet a burst of sickly gray arcane energy launched from the elf's finger. The bullet slammed into the beast hard enough to force it back a step. Yet instead of getting angry as the simple creatures often would, it looked to me pleadingly before it clutched its stomach and slumped to its knees, convulsing in a pile of its lost bile, bladder, and bowels.

"My disease magic can create any disease I can think of or manipulate any existing disease. That was a little stomach virus made more potent than it should be. But worry not! It will not spread." As if to prove her point, she swept her hand toward the ogre and her arcana drifted down like a blanket, spawning a carpet of violet moss that crept toward the ogre's seeping stool, wanting. Like rock being overtaken by mycelium or some organic slime, the moss swept over the stool to encompass them wholly. Writhing, the moss congealed into roots that burrowed, while the violet stems and leaves compressed into stalks, grew into vibrant flowers, and eventually bore fruits of violet, orange, and golden hues; disappearing the filth entirely, replacing it with an eldritch tree, small and stout.

The plants withered into dust as their fruits were plucked by Reina's hand. Leaving, in the end, what amounted to something like soot covering the backside of the unmoving creature.

"Would you like some?" She then asked, halfway into biting one of the exotic pieces.

I looked at the 1st son, Sid, at once. Being fully aware of what was coming, he took the fruit without so much as looking at me. Yet it was done with an audacious sigh that would surely be punished later. His demeanor seemed to change after biting into the flesh, however. He recoiled in a way that suggested pleasant surprise and nearly lost his manners in feasting on it. It was enough of a display to make Shaenya contemplate eating one. I, however, would not be eating something born from ogre stool.

"Oh, wow!" He laughed dumbly. "That's nice."

"Right!" Reina sighed. "It's like burnbud, kind of."

"Yes, yes. We all know the Destroyer loves the stuff." I rolled my eyes. "It is natural for you all to as well, I suppose. That aside, this is the purity you spoke of?"

"Mhm." She nodded, waving again to release darker brambles that attacked the ogre itself; digging into the flesh to release a pestilential ooze inside its innards akin to a spider's fangs. As it poured out of the many lesions created by the plagued roots, the discharge crystallized and simultaneously condensed into petrified wood. Forming, in the end, a large stump with black grains and crimson crystals speckled with gold.

"This is the other half of my druid craft. Yet, I also have an affinity for floral mana." She continued, casting vibrant green mana into some nearby roots. Yet, the result was no different from the work of any druid. The roots detached from the wall as if they had a mind for themselves, growing and splitting to form an elegant table with moss-padded chairs whilst other roots wound around the trunk of petrified crystals to pull it closer to our gathering.

What came next, however, was far more intriguing.

The same energy was gathered in her hand and left to flow over her palm like a sea of green spores. Or, truer to the result, seeds. They bloomed into a ring of deep blue flowers that output a fog of magical darkness around us, obscuring the rest of the Halls. "On natural plants, this magic can let me mold their shape into any I wish. But they can only function as they naturally would. The plants I create, however…"

As she paused, a bulbous flower of a vibrant orange color bloomed atop her palm and unfurled its midnight leaves. As if an ancient dragon was inhaling, the surrounding darkness funneled into the creation, causing its gilded bulb to glow ever brighter and eventually thrum with energy. A silent pulse released an illuminated beam of arcane darkness that burrowed through a nearby stalagmite as easily as adamantine through steel and disappeared the rubble to the abyssal darkness; leaving nothing but the crashing whispers of what once was.

"They can be used for anything." Reina finished her words with a childish giggle. Then bent low amongst the crushed corpses of fallen slaves to retrieve a curiously large fallen stone, around the size of her head. "While they help, these affinities are not what allow me to create life, though. They are... enhancers." She eerily said, infusing mana of a golden-red hue into the stone before setting it gently on the table.

Such strength.

I was just beginning to inquire further when the stone suddenly moved on its own. A subtle motion. A hardly perceptible swell. Then, not a second later, it deflated. Then another swell. Almost as if… "The rock breathes."

"Life Magic." She proudly proclaimed. And rightly so. To be a cleric of a life deity was one thing. To have an affinity for life was... unprecedented. If. If not with limitations, I would come to learn once she cast the same magic upon a nearby minotaur corpse.

Nothing happened. It did not heal it. It was not reanimated with necromancy or returned to life through some other means, yet it stood to open its eyes, senseless and lacking in intelligence. Like a webbed feral beast. A puppet without a soul.

"Animation." I openly surmised. "Things are made to move themselves with your magic. Be they dead or alive."

"Mmm." Reina so charmingly confirmed. "It doesn't work on living things, and the magic doesn't grant dead things a soul, so when they die, they die. No afterlife. Wisdom and intellect are proportional to the amount of mana used. However." She grinned slyly whilst infusing more life into the stone. "When merged with my final affinity, it yields quite the interesting creation."

Her final words saw a stream of deeper, crimson mana fall into the stone. Seemingly to no effect for several seconds until the stone began vibrating. Then rumbling. Then shifting and cracking along its surface as an acute ridge stretched it's face, with two depressions bisected by a vertical ridge, with large concentric circles etched within.

I stared, bemused until the circles suddenly shifted to me, wherein I understood. "The rock sees."

More rumbling ensued as the rock formed two more ridges along its bottom length, separated by a deep vale that eventually formed a rumbling chasm that rattled the surrounding chamber with a grating tremor. "Well, what the Hells ya starin' at?"

I could only blink rapidly in response. Meanwhile, Sid, Reina, and even Shaenya were suffering from the effect of those fruits. Giggling madly, they cupped their mouths and stared wide-eyed at the creation. Leaving me as the only one with the senses to state the obvious. "The rock speaks."

"I ain't no mother fucking rock! I'm a boulder, bitch!"

"How would you like to be a pebble?" I sneered.

"O- oh! Okay!" the rock recoiled, then turned to face Reina. "Hey, Mama! Give me some more o' that muscle so I can burst this broad's head open!"

Smiling, Reina picked the rock up and held its shoulder-width mass over her face as one would a fine gem or the head of their enemy. "How about you become something other than a boulder? Like… a statue?"

"Hows' bout a hammer!" The rock growled. To which Reina seemed reluctant.

"Well, I don't use hammers, so..."

"Well, make someone that does!"

"Oh, that's a great idea!" she bounced excitedly in place, turning to us. "Would you like a tour of the Flesh Kitchen? I've never had guests before. This is all so exciting!"

"That sounds fuckin'… disturbingly wicked. Hells yeah."

"Silence!" I hissed to the second son, Javrith, before turning back to the druid. "We shall follow you."

"Oh, how lovely!" She bounced again, this time on her way to the crystal stump to lower her hands to hover above the ground.

What I half-suspected came to be. Flowers of some sort encompassed us to transport us to wherever this kitchen was. Only, I assumed it to be a simple means of teleportation to take us somewhere far. What happened was a ring of brambles grew from the floor, surrounding us in a cage that was filled with flowers pitched blacker than the blackest night. With prayer, I tracked my position across the realms. Only to find we had moved to a strange, snaking tunnel just beneath the surface above. Eager to sense this new environment that was so close to our home, I opened my senses as the leaves and brambles of our cage dispersed. Regretfully so.

A warm stench, so pungent it nearly forced me to my knees, wailed against my nose the moment the cage fell. I began to curse and prepare to bleed dry this accursed elf, only to have my ire replaced with morbid curiosity, for below my hand was a polished floor of crimson crystals, crisscrossed with a network of glowing yellow lines that pitched the humid tunnel in a dim ambience. With haste, I craned above to see no stone forming the archways above, only ribs, connected to a spine that extended to my sides for leagues.

With unyielding mirth, Reina explained her flesh-borne magic whilst giving us a tour of her similarly aligned factory; first by depositing both her crystal and the minotaur into a succession of pits that stripped their hair, skin, fat, and muscle whilst decoding some type of cipher to learn each physical trait of those sacrificed. Then we were led through the long tunnel, listening to the intricacies of her abilities.

Like her other magics, Flesh Magic had its limitations. Namely, that it could not work on the body of a live specimen. It could, however, remold dead flesh, including hers, as Reina saw fit; changing it at the 'genetic level' or manipulating blood, organs, and bone into the structures we saw in her factories, or into shields, armor, or weapons. So too could the mana create various types of flesh. Sinew. Fat. Muscle. Brains. Whatever she needed, tailored to fit whatever situation. Though, she described it to be, 'cost prohibitive.' Instead, she used this factory to gather flesh en masse to use her magic efficiently, altering vast quantities of flesh to create new life forms tailored for peak efficiency; or to adapt herself and her subordinates to their goals and their environments.

The end of her tour led us to a place that could have only been described as a scrying chamber. Inside was a woman sitting atop a throne of yellowed bone, her focus trained on a membrane lining the wall before her while she attempted to twist, tug, and release her hands from the grotesquely large lips on her armrests.

Calling her Delilah, Reina summoned the woman off her seat for an introduction, bringing me to the strangest creature I've witnessed in my nearly three centuries of living. She was small, yet solidly built. A build that would have suggested a mix of halfling and dwarf were it not for the metallic scales covering her frame. More like a strange birded lizard, was she, for long feathers trailed off her hag-like arms and sharp fangs protruded from her somewhat beaked maw, yet there was no tail on her backside. Her hands and feet were certainly molded like claws and talons, yet any sharp endings were either missing or retractable. Her scales were feathered and furred along the neck and back and seemed to be powdered in gold dust. Yet… somehow, she was not unnerving.

"Welcome to our Gumba." She bowed politely.

"Gumba?" I asked, looking at Reina.

"It's an acronym. Each letter means something." She answered. "Gestated, Undying, Modular Bioorganic Assembler. I'll show you. Delilah?"

"Yes, Mother?"

"I've foraged an ogre, a minotaur, and many goblins, so we'll be making a King today."

Hesitantly, I took a seat. But readily, I watched and listened to Reina tell this creature what capabilities she wished to see in this... king. In a way; it was like listening to child dreaming of creatures they'd use to torment their enemies. The 'Frame' of a minotaur with a… 'Sp7. Type, Osseous Ore mutation;' whatever that meant. The 'Mind' of a half-elf merged with a minotaur's disposition. 'Peripherals' made from elven nerves, further polluted with the tactile senses of both deep gnomes and gray dwarves. 'Drives,' comprising an ogre's musculature and a minotaur's organs. She wanted the Arms to be mutated with that 'Osseous Ore,' tailored to be secreted from the horns, forearms, groin, and forelegs. "Like chitinous armor." She described. "And a bull tail with a poisoned barb hidden beneath the hair."

It only grew more ridiculous as she went on. 'Supplements' comprising cloven hooves taken from mountain goats. A double coat of fur mixed with the traits of otter and bison. Short and thick enough on the inside to repel water and long enough on the outside to keep warm. Yet capable of shedding at a moment's notice in hotter environments. I thought it all to be a crass joke, and yet, this Delilah was working diligently atop her throne; her focus trained on the wide membrane before her while her arms twisted, tugged, and pushed those disgusting things sucking on her hands.

With a prayer to Lilith, Most High, I stepped closer, moving to stand beside her throne and gaze upon her works in bewilderment, for I saw an illusory image of what this creature would look like and could not imagine it coming to be.

Once her movements were spent and the Kitchen went into motion, the membrane showed me not some creature being assembled piece by piece. It showed a bulbous sack- a womb filling with a viscous clear fluid and a small something being deposited inside before the membrane self-sealed and was taken by a claw of wood and stone. Up and around the little egg went, chased by whatever thing granted us this scrying view until it came to rest in some sort of fleshy cradle. Only then did our view expand to see a crystal stalactite peering over the tiny egg. Black but reflecting an endless shower of colors, even while a hundred ghostly visages swirled in anguish within its facets.

"Deep Opal." I recognized both the makeup and energy within at once. "Filled with... souls."

"Partially correct." Reina charmingly said. "It's wicked. Devil's Opal. Only fiends and undead can use it without going mad, hehe! This is what I was given to give my children souls." She said airily, then gave a final nod to her creature, Delilah.

She announced all she was doing. Though it made little sense, I knew what a catalyst was, albeit not in this context. Once it had been loaded, however, the 'Soul Infusion' was complete. That made sense. The coinciding image of the same minotaur that had been crushed did not, but only because I refused to believe it. The words, 'Loading Memetic Profile' caught my attention next, however. They made not a hint of sense. Although 'War College' did. 'Memory Format' was another unknown. But like every other thing, its completion was announced, and none came after. No, what came after was an array of venous conduits. Many approached to encompass the egg. Others penetrated it to line the inside walls and connect themselves to that small 'something' contained inside. A little something that, as the seconds passed to minutes and on to hours, grew and grew and grew before our eyes.