Post by Silumas on Feb 13, 2015 16:15:25 GMT -5
Three years ago….
The stories that tell the tales of demons and devils are so very one sided. They did not choose the lives they lead, the way they were born, their dispositions. They were created, usually by something far fouler, far wickeder than the creature that is so despised by the world. Such was the case with Jezabel, a Succubus created from the mind of the Dark One. A creature of pure beauty, sex appeal, and a mind built for pure seduction, manipulation, and corruption of the souls of man.
The halls of Isolation, the place she called home, was bustling with activity. The conquest of a new plane usually involved a lot of work for those that found themselves indebted, enslaved, or enthralled by their master, the Dark One. Jezabel had served him for eight years now, created from the souls of the slain, and was one of a handful of beings that were allowed in his inner sanctum. Such were the privileges of the Dark One’s lover.
The form of a Succubus was malleable, always in flux depending upon the whims of those around her. She walked past a few filthy, depraved mortals who served in the Dark One’s armies and she changed to a long-legged human brunette, buxom with green eyes the color of emeralds. She flashed them a grin with just the right amount of teeth that set a few of them drooling. Entering the gate they guarded of the massive pyramid within the demiplane of Isolation, her eyes were set upon the massive form of a just waking Balor, a devil of great power. Her form changed again, this time to something most mortals would recognize as a Succubus. Limbs just too long, face of an angel, large folded bat-wings, and without a scrap of clothing. Her devilish tail whipped impatiently as the brute stood in her way.
The Balor is the quintessential devil most associate with the evil of the Dark One’s kind. At least three stories tall, a body rippling with muscle and fire, a face of pure evil. A pig nose, empty eye sockets that reflect the blazing inferno within, and goat horns. Upon seeing the beauty Jezabel he folded his arms in front and released a long, lusty growl. She had been an object of the Balor’s desire for a long time.
“Move, Mammon, the Master has summoned me,” Jezabel spoke, her voice full of impatience. The weird echo associated with many of her kind enunciated her hatred for the being before her.
The thirty foot tall devil gave an ugly grin, wicked, yellow teeth poking out as smoke chuffed from his nose, laughing, “I’m sure the Dark One wouldn’t mind us taking a few minutes to ourselves, Jezzy,” His snake tongue flicked out, “I’d show you a lovely time. I promise I wouldn’t hurt you….much.”
Jezabel growled herself, though hers lacked the lust, and contained a heavy dose of wrath. Before she could respond, however, thunder cracked across the sky of Isolation. The demiplane the Dark One called home was not as nightmarish as its occupants. The place was a very orderly city, build upon a grid pattern. All the buildings were built of basalt stone, a matte black stone that sucked in the light of the perpetual twilight of the plane. The streets too were made of a black stone, this obsidian though, which reflected the light off the sharp edges and smoothed parts. The skies were forever clear of rain, as the Dark One despised the disorderly nature of mud and water. Thus the rip of thunder across the sky was ominous for the beings of the plane.
“Mammon, I would very much mind you wasting my time. Escort my dear to my sanctum. Touch her, and I will flay your skin for the next ten-thousand years, then the next ten-thousand will involve you being digested by the great wyrms of Archanon. Are we clear?” the voice of the Dark One echoed throughout the entirety of the Plane, making it clear to all those that served him that Jezabel was someone that should not be trifled with.
The great devil shivered at the thought and gestured to Jezabel as he shoved upon the massive doors of central pyramid of Isolation. This massive pyramid, whose top could not be seen from the ground, was the home of the Dark One and the central location of the plane. The gridded city streets of the plane were all spokes that extended from this place. It was made entirely of onyx, and all of its faces were smoothed to perfection.
Mammon led Jezabel as instructed, and they climbed countless flights of stairs without ever encountering another being. The Dark One, despite his tendency towards conquering plane after plane of existence, despised other beings. He preferred the company of himself and his research. His marching armies made it seem as if he were looking for something, they would conquer a plane, replenish their supplies by pillaging, and their forces through slavery, and then move onto the next. All of these raids launching from Isolation. What they were looking for, though, was lost on Jezabel. The Dark One never bothered to share.
An hour of climbing would pass before they found themselves at the place where the Dark One resided. It was a massive chamber, hundreds of yards in all directions from the top of the stairs. Artifacts of all kinds lay strewn about the place, some working, some not, most in pieces as the master had puzzled out how they worked and thrown them aside for the next puzzle.
“She is here, Master,” Mammon called out, unable to see the Dark one within the room. His voice was shaky, the fear evident.
“I am aware,” the Dark One whispered from underneath his hood. He was a tall creature, but tiny compared to the Balor. Just over six foot tall, he was covered head to toe in a black robe, color annoyed the Dark One, as he found it chaotic and upsetting. His face was obfuscated by the shadows in the room. He extended a hand towards the great devil and slowly balled his fingers into a fist. Jezabel was not sure which sound was more sickening: the loud pop of the devils right kneecap imploding into hundreds of tiny pieces or the roar of pain and fear the Balor gave out as it happened. The Dark One then flicked his fingers back out and the devil plummeted over the edge, but was held suspended upon the magic of the Dark One.
“If you ever speak to her that way again,” the Dark One hissed, “every bone in your body will find themselves shredded this way, over and over and over, until I am satisfied you understand your place.”
The devil was in far too much pain to respond and could only scream as the Dark One released his hold over Mammon’s form and he found himself plummeting towards the base of the pyramid. The devil would survive, but would not soon forget what he had been told.
Jezabel bit her lip in pure ecstasy as she watched her master punish those that would dare interfere with him. Her form changed once more to something she was not sure she appreciated. She had thought the Dark One would want to see her as a vixen of pure lust, or perhaps a fallen angel that he could ravish at his whim, such was not the case. The form he desired her in was human. A waif of a girl, perhaps closer to five feet than six. Skin of alabaster, and of a young age, perhaps twenty. Her hair was raven black, going to her waist, and she was dressed very modestly. Far too modest for her taste. Loose fitting denim pants, she had her the Dark One call them jeans once, and a cotton fabric shirt with short sleeves.
“You summoned me, Dark One?” Jezabel spoke, a soft smile on her face.
“I have asked you not to call me that,” he spoke, his voice heavy, wearisome almost. She had not heard him like that in a long time, and it worried the Succubus.
“Forgive me, mast…I mean, Silumas,” Jezabel placed a hand on his arm and drew back his hood, revealing a face he showed very few these days, the action affectionate, gentle, caring even. It felt very foreign to the demon, but she knew it was what her master desired.
Silumas’ face was angular, with high cheek bones, and sunken eyes. Those eyes fluxed between amber and scarlet, both depending upon his mood and the lighting. He was clean shaven, and bald, though bushy, black eyebrows remained. He was not an overly handsome man, but not repulsive either. His forehead was etched with worry lines. His search, for whatever it was, was going very poorly.
“What can I do for you, my love?” Jezabel spoke, her voice growing husky with lust, her eyes half closed as she pressed her body to his own. She looked into his eyes and her attempt at seduction ended immediately seeing the harsh, blood red eyes of displeasure staring down at her.
“Not now, Jezabel. I have work to do, but I did not wish to be alone. Just keep your presence close and entertain yourself as you will,” Silumas brushed her aside forcefully, and made his way across the great room to a table that contained odd maps that looked like no geography the Succubus had ever seen.
His orders had been clear though, and it was not the first time he had just wanted her close enough to speak to, or perhaps squeeze a shoulder or thigh absently while he thought over whatever was puzzling him. She hopped up on the table next to him and idly picked up a book. It was entitled something strange, “A Brief History of Time,” by someone named Hawking. It was a boring read, the ideas by some human about how the universe worked and its history dating billions of years. She was amazed at how wrong the man was, but it still took her several hours to understand how he had come to the conclusion he had. His math and concepts were beyond her understanding, but the notes scrolled at the margins by her master made it appear this Hawking fellow was not far off on the basics.
Time was a difficult thing to tell within Isolation. With no moon, no stars, and the sun at a perpetual sunset in the north, knowing the passage of time was nigh-impossible. Jezabel assumed hours had passed since she last put the book down and watched her master work. Watching Silumas was far less enchanting that it might seem. She did not watch magic flow, or him tinker with arcane devices, or even Planeswalk. No, she watched him stare at this gigantic map of what she could only guess was the Multiverse and think. For those hours he did not move, did not blink, did not breathe, he simple stared at the map. Until finally, the frustration broke Silumas’ calm gaze and his fist slammed down into the table, splintering the wood in a perfectly straight line from where his fist connected to the other side.
It was a hard enough hit it popped Jezabel from the table a good three inches and she gasped a breath in fear. Silumas had never hurt her, even when she had angered him, but she had seen him cause a great deal of suffering, pain, and anguish to countless beings across a number of planes for defying him, or simply being within proximity when something did not go right. Silumas did not make a move to harm her, or even acknowledge her presence, but she saw something on his face she had never seen before. Jezabel was a Succubus, she was created to read people, to understand how to manipulate them to corruption, to seduce them to her master’s service. What she read on Silumas was terrifying: she read failure.
She had never seen him fail at anything he had undertaken, from conquest, to negotiation, to the destruction of so-called gods, Silumas was successful at everything, everything but what he was trying to do now. She hopped off the table, her form moving in a way that would have caused most men’s blood to pump harder, and wrapped her arms around Silumas from behind. She laid her head against his back.
“What’s bothering you so badly, my love?” Jezabel spoke her voice as friendly, as affectionate as possible.
It was several minutes before Silumas responded, though from the moment she touched him she sensed him relax a few notches, “It is nothing, do not concern yourself with it. I will find it again, it is just taking far longer than I first anticipated.”
“What is it you are looking for?” Jezabel regretted the question as soon as she spoke it. She had asked it before, and that was why she found herself banished from his sanctum last time. It had been months since she had seen him, and now he would cast her out again.
Silumas shoved her back, causing her to almost fall backwards several feet from where she had been, and she saw the anger on his face that would bring about her exile. “How dare y…” he began and then cut off. His eyes narrowed, and she could sense mana gathering within him. It was an amount of power that would have obliterated anyone else on the plane.
“Jezabel, get behind me,” Silumas commanded, his voice dark, hushed as he stared to the south.
Jezabel began moving involuntarily at his behest, taking position where Silumas would between her and the stairs, “What’s going on, love?”
“Something is here,” was all Silumas said. A simple statement, with a horrible amount of meaning. She had never seen him like this. A god once assaulted Isolation and Silumas dispatched the being, behaving with annoyance, not fear. Whatever was here inspired Silumas to become defensive, which was frightening indeed.
Minutes that felt like days passed, Silumas standing with one arm behind him reaching out for Jezabel, the other at his side as he contained the energy of hundreds of planes preparing for battle. The pyramid was so heavily enchanted, the only way anything could attack Silumas would be to come through the staircase. Or, so he thought.
The cloud of shadow, for that was all Silumas could describe it as later, came through the walls behind Jezabel. Seeping through cracks, weaknesses in both the masonry and magic that Silumas would not even have been able to identify. The northern half of the room was consumed by the thing before Silumas realized he had been tricked. The Planeswalker spun and flung a vicious, fiery red globe of mana at the creature. And it reached for it.
This thing, whatever it was, yearned for the magic that Silumas flung at it. Sucked it into itself and seemed no further phased than a human casually sipping at water. Jezabel had no time to react, the thing moved so quickly, a spear of shadow ripped from the body of the beast and tore into her middle. Her eyes went wide as the thing grabbed at the souls that created her, crushed them, and consumed them, all in one swift motion. The shadowy smoke-like spear slowly withdrew back to the beast, as Jezabel crumpled to the floor. Her life, her being, destroyed in a simple action. And Silumas grew enraged.
Few things truly enraged the Planeswalker anymore. He was frustrated often, his minions were foolish, his task herculean, and his loneliness insurmountable, but he was never truly enraged. Nothing could hurt him, or so he thought, so nothing could truly anger him. Until today. Until he lost Jezabel. She provided some amount of comfort with her touch, her presence, her voice, and the place she reminded him of, but now she had been taken from him. This thing had invaded his home, destroyed his small comfort, and simply stared at him.
Silumas gathered that rage, that loneliness, and constructed the most destructive spell he had ever wrought and launched it at the beast. It was not just energy, it was emotion, it was baleful, it was created from the very essence of mana and the thing reeled back. It retreated back a few feet from the blast of energy, its violet and scarlet energies ripping into the creature. Then, it absorbed it, just as it had his previous attack.
The same spear of smokey shadow ripped from the creature again, this time towards Silumas’ heart. Unlike Jezabel, Silumas possessed millennia of experience in combat, and sidestepped the attack. He then crossed his arms at the elbow, the sleeves of his robe falling back to reveal two bracers, intricately engraved with dozens of castles, walls, and fields of grain. Two large diamonds near his wrists erupted with bright white light, creating a parabola of energy in front of Silumas. He flung that white mana magic at the beast, and then used his connection with Isolation to rip a hole into the Blind Eternities, and the white shield pushed the creature through it, taking an enormous chunk of his pyramid with it.
Outside he could hear the crumbling of hundreds of basalt buildings, the energy he had consumed in that single fight had rippled through his plane. It had broken the foundations and it would not survive another encounter. Silumas stared out of the hundreds of depraved beings he oversaw, the demons and devils, lechers and soldiers in his army. The confusion caused by the sudden earthquake like energies flowing through his realm was palpable, they had no idea something more powerful than any god, any Planeswalker, was out there hunting them, hunting Silumas. Silumas had no idea what the creature was, or why it had tracked him down, he knew only one thing.
It was coming back.
Present Day…
The crunch of boots on white, powdery snow echoed across the valley of a plane long forgotten by any life. It was intensely cold, deadly to any known form of life Silumas had ever encountered. It was hard to tell if he was ignoring his corporeal form, or if he had just gone completely numb. It was pitch black, no star’s light could pierce the ever-constant blizzard, and Silumas believed it had no proximity to any star like the Sun was to Earth.Silumas stopped a moment, and smiled beneath his helm. That lonely, backwards, cursed plane of Earth that he despised, that despised him, and yet he still could not stop thinking about it. Since the death of Jezabel, Earth had been on his mind constantly. While he considered no one a friend, a being of Silumas’ might and power needed no friends, there were a few people he cared about. It felt like eons since he had sparred with SwingBlade, matching blows with a being almost his equivalent. Others who feared him, respected him, but still had the bravery to speak to him. Demons did not need to speak to their master to be controlled, devils feared the repercussions of the wrong word. Only Jezabel had dared speak to him, and her words were flowery, flattering, and all-together false.
The mountain, like Silumas, was alone on this plane; the last bastion of stone standing before the might of the blizzard. He had come hunting the creature that attacked him those years ago. Whatever it was, the being was secretive. He had visited thirty planes in the year after the attack, and no one could tell him anything. Magic could not track it either, any attempts resulted in a fizzling of the spell. Then, Silumas discovered its weakness, its reason for attacking him. It was feeding. The creature fed on PlanesWalker Sparks the way a cow might feed on grass.
This has occurred when he visited a plane he knew protected by another PlanesWalker. It was a plane without civilization, a plane of natural wonders, beasts, and fauna. Silumas had visited centuries ago, and the two had disagreed on a number of points. This disagreement had left them on poor terms, and both relatively scarred. Silumas decided it was not worth his time to destroy his colleague, as he had other interests at the time. Now, he came back to seek a temporary alliance against whatever this creature was. His arrival showed him he was too late. Death was everywhere. Every tree was rotted, every plant decayed, and every animal long since decomposed. While this normally would have made Silumas delighted, now he knew his problem was far beyond anything he had faced before.
Now, he climbed the only mountain left on a forsaken plane, his determination driving him towards perhaps the only thing in the Omniverse capable of destroying him. As he neared the top he could feel the presence of the creature, and Silumas knew well it had been stalking him since his arrival. The beast devoured gods and PlanesWalkers, using them to nourish itself, but Silumas refused to be its next snack. The dark cloud emerged from the blizzard in front of him, it ebbed and flowed around him warily. It had been banished by Silumas before, but he could tell its hunger, its curiosity, kept it from fleeing.
Silumas took a deep breath, which was incredibly painful, the biting cold filling his corporeal form. HE didn’t need to breathe, in fact he rarely did, but in this moment, human reflexes took command. For the weather, he was sorely underdressed. Black silk encased his form, with studded leather, dyed grey, padded his form at all points but the joints. The studs were not iron, instead they were devices of his own creation: mana gems. Possessing the hardness of diamonds, they still gave adequate physical protection, but more importantly they contained the essence of the mana whose color they matched. While Silumas was powerful, perhaps more so than a handful of beings in the Omniverse, his power had limits, limits he would need to stretch to defeat this creature. The gems gave him access to more mana than he normally had. His boots moved with the flexibility of silk, but the sheen of metal, a dull, possessing a dull, sapphire luster, and with no apparent laces. His gloves were a dark leather, tucked into the bracers of protection he normally wore. A long cape flowed down his back, a tapestry of death and destruction woven in it, as it swished in the wind, it seemed to have an almost malevolent behavior, yearning to destroy anything and everything Silumas encountered. His head was covered by a silken garb, covering his face, bright red and glaringly different to the remainder of his garb. What he wore was for function, not fashion.
The dark cloud and Silumas sized each up for but a moment before the battle began, and it lasted no longer. The beast was ready for Silumas, for his bag of tricks, and everything Silumas could do. How it knew him, how it was so well prepared was a mystery, and the only thing that truly scared the PlanesWalker. His corporeal form was badly mangled, but the pain barely registered to the PlanesWalker, as the beasts first strike was to his shoulder, above his heart, above his Spark. The black tendril that erupted from the beast was ineffably quick. The only thing Silumas could was dive backwards, and the spike tore into his shoulder. The thing struck again, still too fast for Silumas, this tendril tearing through his left thigh, ripping armor and bone like butter. That was when Silumas realized just how much trouble he had borrowed. He was pinned, trapped, beneath the hulk of a creature more powerful than anything in creation, and it was about to destroy him.
Silumas was doomed. He was also violently defiant.
The creature paused a moment, taking in its kill, or praying over the blessing, or gloating, its motivation was impossible to understand. The creature struck once more, a dark, vile tendril plunging to Silumas’ chest. It broken skin, then bone, before Silumas could react. His bracers lit with a rebellious, shining light of white as his left hand grabbed the nebulous tendril and stopped its progress. Silumas narrowed in his eyes, concentration and focus trying to escape him as the creatures tendril brushes the edges of his heart, of his Spark, scarring it deeply. All Silumas could do now was run. Run home.
Isolation did not enter his mind, though, when he began the ‘Walk. Instead, when Silumas began his run home, he ‘Walked to Earth. The creature held on, though, grasping at his Spark, trying to keep him from fleeing, rending it by its vicious, clawed, and nebulous tendril. The two of them rode the Blind Eternities bouncing furiously between the upper atmosphere of Earth, the space between planes, and the mountain plane of the creature for almost a minute before Silumas, in his defiance, decided to make one last gambit.
Silumas waited until the creature had grabbed onto his Spark one more time, but gave it just a little more grip. The Spark is not a physical thing, it is something both spiritual and magical, being both the soul and power of a PlanesWalker. The pain was unlike anything Silumas had ever experienced, a rending of his spirit from his flesh. It was when the thing had almost finished that Silumas unleashed a scream that could be felt on Earth. For mortals on Earth it might seem an earthquake, or a strange, strong gust of wind, or the heat of a fire increasing uncomfortably, wolves howling and trees groaning under an inexistent breeze, a power behind the words of a preacher that was not there before, or a chill at a graveyard in warm weather. Silumas ‘Walked for what might be the final time.
Using a power found deep within his own Spark, he had ‘Walked to Earth and broke contact with creature. It took a large measure of his Spark when it did so, but could not follow. The ripping of his Spark was stronger than any splitting of an atom. The magical energies unleashed allowed him to do something so magnanimous it would have taken a dozen PlanesWalkers years of ritual to do the same. Planes are arranged in clusters, drawn together by a force like gravity, or maybe even gravity itself, but it is impossible to know. Silumas, using the power of a splitted Spark, sealed the Earth cluster off from the rest of the Omniverse just after his ‘Walk. While there were still a couple dozen that could be accessed, the creature, and Isolation, were not in that grouping. Silumas was trapped on Earth, but he was secreted away from the creature, from the Black Cloud.
A hole ripped between the planes for a moment, a blinding flash of light at the upper atmosphere of Earth above the south pacific. Silumas appeared a dozen miles above the Earth, a vicious, obsidian colored spike sticking from his chest. The crew of the international space station reported strange lightning as they passed over, but Houston was able to find no matching meteorological events. Those that could sense power, magical or otherwise, however, felt something very different. During the minute time that Silumas had ‘Walked to Earth, he had brought a piece of the creature with him. Its power, so intense, would have been painful to any mortal that could sense it. Some knew Silumas’ signature, and his own immensely powerful signature would be unmistakable to those that had felt it before. It was not there long, however, fading almost as quickly as the other.
The fall to Earth was something that Silumas did not experience, he had blacked out from the pain of his Spark tearing. It lasted a few minutes, the height from which he fall being so tremendous, and the speed with which he hit the southern Pacific ocean crumpled his physical form. Hours later, the PlanesWalker regained consciousness, his mouth half full of sand and blood and he struggled to breathe. He found his form unable to respond, and the unbearable pain from its entirety was not being blocked out. A vast amount of the control he once had was missing, and he could not remake his corporeal form. So, he attempted to roll onto his back, at least then he’ll stop breathing in that irritating sand.
While he succeeded in rolling over, the pain that erupted from his chest caused him to blackout again. A few moments later he awoke again with a scream and an epiphany. His Spark was not completely gone, or he would have died hours ago. His mind reached out to the land around him, reaching for what would give him the mana he needed to heal himself. Thankfully, the small island he found himself on was covered in forest, and he used that greenery to boost his metabolism, speeding his healing from months to minutes. Soon, he was able to remove the shard from his chest, though not without tremendous amounts of pain. The shard was powerless away from the rest of the Black Cloud, but Silumas put it in a pocket anyway.
The island, a few dozen square kilometers in size, was a quiet place away from civilization. He sat at the beach, staring into the open waters, while things that were so abnormal for he kept causing strange sensations. His stomach growled from hunger, while he knew how to eat, and what he enjoyed, he had never had to digest food before. His throat was parched, a thirst he was not sure an ocean of fresh water could fix. The sun was hot, and his skin slick with sweat and sticky from blood. He could smell the ocean and that single sense alone gave him comfort. He was alive, he was safe, he was on Earth.
Silumas had come home.