West Marches - Price

West Marches - Price

Revenge. Hate. Pain. Vengeance. Rage. Chaos. Destroy.

The words urge her on. Whirling round and round her head.

Kill him.

Kill HIM.

Cacophonous, and constant. But something has hardened in her. Moons before this, the strangeness of the Lodge made even her stalwart heart tremble. The unknown whispers, the songs and stories. The allure of forbidden mysteries had always been there, but it had been tempered by a healthy preservational instinct.

Now, that instinct had turned to something bleaker.

She had seen. So many things. So many times, places, people. So many versions of herself, in armors, in robes, as a girl, as a young woman. So many times scattered on the rocks, or bleeding crimson rivers across the parched ground.

It had done something, these countless things, these countless lives.

So too had the Lodge been there. The anchors of the myriad times and places, it was not just a space between worlds, but the twisting thorny refuse of an endless lost places. Were she a scholar, she might’ve thought of it as the lost time played too quickly between realities. But she was not, and thus did not give it much thought.

Instead, her fingers played their way over the spines of knowledge.

The Library.

It was not a library in any traditional sense. There were no neatly arranged rows, there were no clean and well cared for shelves. And certainly there was no librarian, no scribemaster or scrollkeeper.

Instead there was only bones.

More than could be counted, and they swirled in an unthinkable gyre lit by spirits.

The bones were demons, who had lived countless lives and eventually been torn asunder, either by enterprising heroes, each other, or their own curious madness. The sound was that of sifting sand, infinite in its trajectory and cadence.

Ceridwen stepped without error, the path having been trod lifetimes before, and perhaps lifetimes again. There was a magic here, it was waiting for her.

It offered a path through the heart of the comet.

And the bones whispered their sweet tales to her ears.

Others entreated her in the dark, made promise and profaned themselves. But their songs faded against her own. She sang beneath her breath, the strange and twisting tune causing the gyre to rattle and accede to her request. In time, the flow of bones formed a breaking wave, trailing along behind and before her.

Until finally, some minutes or hours later.

A most powerful skull of some demon whose name and type had long since been forgotten in the ebb of civilization. There were many magics, but it was this one she sought and this one alone.

In its mouth, a thorny pallid libram, not touched for a thousand years.

A new song for her to sing.