RE:Shuffle

Over the coming days after setting up a preliminary camp around the Evergaol of Rimare-Tul, Baethen took to hunting and foraging to bolster the expedition’s rations and whatnot. Walls wouldn’t be put up until at least a good three-or-four notches or so had passed while everyone settled down and convalesced from the Rounds-long trek. A small cadre were sent to the townships to bring a smattering of supplies in the immediate and, in the distant, give word so that the merchants that waited within Reordran could begin their trek. By then, the burgeoning settlement would reach a state of equilibrium.

It was during one of his many outings into the cerulean wilds beyond the Evergaol that Baethen happened upon a downright strange sight: in a clearing, the canopy wan such that the veil parted to let in the light from above, lay the carcass of a great beast.

Rot hadn’t set in yet and, from afar, there was no sign of illness or disease with pristine scarlet-dark fur that would make great bedding. Its head was in the likeness of a kalegor dog but twelve times as big with tusks jutting out from under its jaw.

A Gods-be-damned huronth. Sure, it was a juvenile but still! Baethen had stumbled on a three-star beast of the behemoth bloodline—these were sure to have a card or two of the same parity. And the tokens, the thrice-damned tokens. Baethen was salivating at just the thought of how much wealth was in the monster’s flesh and bones.

Its ebon blood and internal organs could be used as alchemical reagents, its hide could be treated to become as strong as plate and pliable as silk, its fangs and claws could be carved into spear-heads fit for the highest nobles of Reordran.

Slowly but surely, Baethen made his way towards the carcass, eyes and ears open for threats. The huronth had died of something as these sorts of predators did not fall prey to old age but rather others of their kind. Most likely, its slayer was fighting off the would-be scavengers which meant that Baethen couldn’t linger.

Iron to lodestone, head on a swivel, closer and closer he went til he realised that no wound marred the huronth. No black blood on its rust-red mane or jet-black pelage. Its thick and densely muscled neck was still attached to its shoulders—it was as if the thing had just keeled over and died on the spot.

Looking around, Baethen saw that the huronth had depressed the earth around it. It was outlined by furrows that conformed to its shape; the body itself limbless in the sense that each member was sprawled out this way and that. Almost like it had fallen from a great height.

With a sinking feeling in his gut, Baethen looked up into the canopy.

The blue vault above him opened a single eye. It had no sclera, just one gargantuan sulphur-coloured iris with a bifurcated pupil. It was like a portal into Gehenna, a yawning, churning inferno spiralling into the abyss, whispering sweet, horrid nothings into his mind’s eye.

Mother, O Mother Mine; the flesh burns black under the midnight sabbath; seven mouths sing the lament of Azabre-Dul; death to the Gods, death to the Gods, thrice, We say, death to the Gods; Mother, O Mother Mine.

Gibbering insanity crawled its way into him, sinking roots of all-consuming terror and delirium. Paralysis gripped his spine and held him in place before that terribly-still eye, devoid of saccades and utterly insensate; only the fires of its iris moved, tongues licking at its cornea as if to reach out and devour all those that it beheld. The pupil alone could swallow him whole.

The sky fell on top of Baethen in a blink of its great, baleful eye, blackness enveloping him like a second skin. Suffocating warmth surrounded him, heavy with the shadow of the beast. Its gullet was backwards-barbed, long spines excoriating him as Baethen attempted to claw his way out though there was no way to measure direction inside the belly of the beast. The creature, thankfully, did not have teeth, instead seeming to prefer to asphyxiate its prey after having devoured them whole.

Baethen spat out an ember but it was for nought as it quickly sizzled out; he couldn’t breathe. There was no air inside the creature’s stomach and thus the arcana of fire could not take hold. His first instinct was to call upon his {Sealed} stave but he doubted it could, by itself, carve its way through a monster that had taken down a huronth.

He was going to die here, wasn’t he?

The impending doom gave way to the utter calm that comes with certain death. No longer under the monster’s soul-piercing and body-pinning gaze, Baethen recovered but a semblance of rationality. Meticulously, with the remaining breath in his lungs, he plotted his next set of actions, the course a complicated gambit of many moving parts.

Baethen cupped his hands around his mouth with his sceptre jutting into the cavity he had formed in between his palms. First, he manifested a font of air and then spat into it, able to finally gestate a spark. His one and only arcanum-charge that could give him breathable air was spent.

“[Kindle. Become.]”

The sceptre began to glow dully as Baethen expended all the metallic fonts of iron and steel that were layered into its head’s amalgam. Though he could not see the weapon, he knew so by the heat searing into his lips and the red shining through his fingers. The expended fonts empowered the now-pure, leftover mercury.

With [Parlour-Tricks] he continuously transformed the smoke that would snuff out the growing fire into illusory tongues. To further embolden it, Baethen manifested cinders along the sceptre until that arcanum was wrung dry.

The next actions came simultaneously, a masterstroke born of desperation and single-minded determination. Baethen played [Lesser-Juggler-of-Fire], [Lesser-Narguile-of-Night], and [Slag-and-Scale] to bind the confluence of fonts tight around his weapon; [Kindlers-Breath], [Imp-of-Serpents], and [Forge-Maw] to breathe over the sceptre and transform the red-hot metal into a miniature sun.

“[Smolder. Blaze.]”

The arcanums of mercury and smoke wove together to bind any errant fonts into the building sacrificial pyre. Nothing, nothing would escape or be wasted. Even [Mercurial-Inksmith] provided its own offering: a stave just on the brink of explosion, seeded with a bonfire’s worth of flame.

Lastly came his final Word and then Baethen striked while the iron was hot, stave against sceptre. His rage and terror and panic and madness and black hope gave him the strength needed to bring the hammer down with all that he was and could have been.

“[Sunder.]”

The world went white and then black.

Babylon, Babylon.

The Land-of-Dreams lay in direct opposition to the waking world, both spinning along the same axis but equidistant from both the axis and each other. Men spoke of lands where the dead and the sleeping roamed, cavorting along the shores of nameless Death and they were right; a tower arose from the Hypnagogia’s waters, broken as it reached for the moon that lay above.

Just as the moon was silver in the world above; here, below, it was alabaster-black. The sky, in contrast, a white so dark it may as well have been atramentum. Paradox was to Babylon what truth was to Eot—unreality not so much shifting sand but curling incense smoke that devoured its own tail like a serpent.

Baethen dreamt of a gargantuan shadow reaching from the depths of the waters upon which Nagalfaram sailed, resolving into a mask of resplendent gold, crystals of pyrite erupting along the god’s head in corruscating patterns of wax and wane, mend and wend, ebb and flow, tithe and take.

Reaching towards the mask proved utterly meaningless for when his fingers touched the waters, Baethen knew it to be a reflection. The mask was not within the darkness, had not arisen from it, but instead originated from his own face. Where the mask below was fool’s gold, the one affixed to him was blackest alabaster, refreshingly-cold to the touch.

And when he attempted to pry it off the face of his own soul, he came to know terror. It would not come off, melded inextricably to his very being; roots against roots, water amid waters, threads within the tapestry. When next he surfaced from Babylon, Baethen ‘Sore-Loser’ Locke would not remember a single thing for dreams remained here as reflections remained within the mirror.

Baethen awoke in another person’s bed and, again, it wasn’t Miro’s.

He’d complain about this becoming a habit but given he couldn’t move his tongue and his lips seared nearly shut, well…

Just about every part of his body hurt. His bones ached, fractured but still in the right places. His limbs had been splinted with wood and bound in rope. His left side was numb, the pain burnt away by fire. He could still somehow move his neck at least, so he gave his arm a good look.

It was a long and thin piece of charcoal below the elbow. Baethen still felt as if his hand was still there, a phantom remaining even after the flesh was long gone and turned to ash. They hadn’t amputated it yet probably because of his dire condition—he shouldn’t even be alive.

His right hand was the only thing that hadn’t been thoroughly broken. Two fingers were splinted, aye, but there were two others that he could use. The pinky wasn’t his favourite digit so its loss wasn’t much to him. Baethen was just glad he had enough fingers to wank.

Curious as to the damage to his lips and face, Baethen ran his hand gently along it, noting that he still had his beard, somehow. [Forge-Maw] had something to do with it, he reckoned. Cards tended not to hurt their players and thus endowed them with resistance in so far as it concerned their effects.

His tongue, on the other hand, was gone. Which, now that he thought of it, was also gone. [Imp-of-Serpents] had backlashed from the confluence of energies and cards and the like, incinerating Baethen’s tongue down to its root from the sheer amount of magicks that had been channelled through it.

Well, that made things a bit worse. Taste, as far as senses went, gave him a good deal of pleasure. Black rage crept up on Baethen as he realised that he’d never taste his mother’s cooking ever again.

Without meaning to, smoke wafted from his nostrils as if he were a dragon, his cards played without his meaning to. He wanted to scream but knew better than to burn down the tent he found himself in. Should he open his lips, he’d spit out vitriol.

The tent’s flap opened a flick or two later.

“Morophesh wept! You’re awake!”

Lazarra waddled as fast as she could, somehow weeping openly and berating him at the same time as she carried her bucket of water with her. “Quickly, place this card in your Hand. It’s a transfiguration type that’ll stabilise your organs.”

He did as he was told, letting Lazarra place the card atop his sternum and accepting it into his soul. With half a foot within Babylon and another in Eot, lightning struck Baethen’s spine, epiphany seeming to thunder in the space between his ears. He awoke from the land of dreams and pointed towards the bucket that Lazarra held and gestured frantically as he could—which wasn’t much given his current state of weakness.

Lazarra complied, chiding him for this and that as she poured sips from a ladle into his mouth.

Baethen redrew his Hand and played [Celestial-Dew].

The water inside him grew resplendent in the merciful power of the God-of-All-Sorrows, a great presence of empathy falling upon him as tears fell down his cheeks. They continued, uncaring of how water usually flowed as divinity carried them throughout Baethen’s body within and without. Wherever the celestial dew touched, life blossomed, flesh reknitting and bone regrowing and skin regenerating, unblemished by scar.

By the end of the miracle, there was only a single thing to remind Baethen of his brush with death: his left arm, from the elbow below, was black as soot as if he’d been in the smithy a whole day. No water could clean it nor did it mar anything that it touched. Even the fingernails had been tanned an umber that was like tar. When the light shined just right about his changed limb, Baethen swore he saw the vague outline of scales.

Lazarra prayed and chanted mores to Morophesh throughout it all, thanking the Eighteenth God for His mercy. Baethen, though never much a devout, offered his thanks as well.

The relief only lasted until Lazarra had time to observe Baethen’s changed arm.

“Morophesh wept.”