“Imagine someone bashed your skull in but by some dark miracle, you survived, albeit barely. Leaving you with a body that don’t listen, a brain all scrambled, and the worst pain you’d ever felt. Now imagine you’re stuck like that, wasting away, starved, delirious, and unable to scratch the festering parts of you, but you don’t jagging die. But then after a few days of that hell, your body moves, it gets up without you telling it to, and starts shambling forward like a drunkard, following the hunger that’s been growing in you past anything a person might survive. Now this stumbling, rotten thing that was once your body finds someone, anyone, maybe a stranger, maybe a friend, or even family, it doesn’t matter to the body, all it cares about is all the meat that person is made out of. So now you have to watch as you attack this person like a wild animal, savaging ‘em and eating all you can, but even when your stomach bursts open from the meal, you’re still jagging hungry. That’s what it’s like to be a ghoul, and that’s why we put them down even if we hated who they were in life.” - Vulch, of the Crow Pickers, speaking to a new recruit.
With a gasp of surprise, Natalie pulled back from the crack, freeing her hand and bringing the chill fingers clutching it into sight. Withered and ghastly pale, they belonged to something starved but still possessing enough unnatural strength to keep Natalie from breaking free. Eyes fixed on the spider-like digits wrapping hers, Natalie felt nothing of the dream-like compulsion that drove her to touch the darkness; in its place was disgust and disquiet. Bracing herself against the stained basalt, she began to pull on the arm, ready to tear it off if it meant freedom. But before she could put much force into the act, a murmur bubbled up from the crack.
“P-p-please, please, please.”
The voice was near-indecipherable, laden with a warbling echo as if it came from beneath stagnant water. Still, something about the tone and accent itched at Natalie’s brain, and she hesitated long enough for more words to reach her.
“Please. Please. I surrender.”
Brow furrowing, Natalie felt her inkling grow into a hunch; but she needed more information before acting upon it. The easiest source, of course, was the entity pleading for mercy. “If you want to surrender, you can start by letting go of my hand.”
In response, the grip tightened and the voice gained a higher even more desperate pitch. “Please, parlay!”
Suspicions all but confirmed now, Natalie set her jaw and yanked hard, putting every drop of will into the act. In a split second, the grip on her went from iron-clad to paper-thin and Natalie pulled free violently. Tumbling backward, Natalie hit the ground hard, the world spinning as her head bounced against the basalt. Blinking away a mix of pain and dizziness, Natalie stared up at the sky, realizing it had changed. Instead of oily darkness interrupted by a blood-red star, it was summer blue with a few drifting, cotton-like clouds. Reaching to prop herself up, Natalie felt soft soil beneath her fingers and quickly realized she was lying amidst crimson lilies instead of stained stone.
Sitting up, Natalie looked around at her mindscape, she’d visited it a few times since the battle, but never for long. Bad memories and unhealthy paranoia kept her from doing much more than using the psychic space as a starting point for that type of magic. Now, as she observed all that had changed, Natalie thought such avoidance might have been a mistake. While the core of her mindscape, the brook of blood surrounded by a field of lilies was the same; she now lay among a new development bordering that stained elysium.
All around her the earth was cracked and churned, deep fissures running between sections torn between upheaval and subsidence. Pale worm-like roots stuck out of exposed banks of dark rich soil, while frost-touched flowers sat at precarious angles, their petals fragile and faded. At the center of this place of disturbance, right before Natalie, was a tree, a burgeoning yew with a widening canopy of alabaster needles she knew to be fangs. Laying maybe a meter from the tree’s mottled red and white trunk, Natalie guessed the eerie sapling she’d encountered before must have tripled in size, but that prodigious growth wasn’t the change that kept her attention. Sticking out of the trunk’s side was what she first thought to be a particularly ugly burl with a bare branch erupting from it. That initial impression didn’t last, as the wood tumor moved its ‘branch’ racing out towards Natalie with grasping ‘twigs’ eager to reclaim its grip.
The Alukah stared at the malformed torso of Baron Sicar, his upper body growing from a black sap-stained canker in the tree’s side like a parasitic twin. As her eyes roamed over the cannibalized Baron’s desiccated form, Natalie noted her metaphor of mutant twins was recursively accurate, as a secondary growth bulged from Sicar’s side, the once-delicate features of Dame Adalie Roux, now stripped of beauty by starvation and agony.
Both vampires spasmed and thrashed against their respective bondage, trying to pull themselves free of the tree and each other. Groping out with his bony fingers, Sicar rasped. “Please! Please! Parlay!”
Slowly getting to her feet, Natalie ignored her victim’s pleading and circled around the tree, drinking in the surroundings. Thick gnarled roots, pale as milk, snaked along and through the ground around the yew, all heading for the nearby fissures. Approaching one, Natalie tentatively peered over the edge, finding the half-exposed root snaking down into a tenebrous gap worryingly similar to what she'd found in her cistern. Peering closely, Natalie could see how the deepest roots were shot through by veins of black, making her wonder if they fed upon the darkness below like a mundane tree might groundwater.
Squatting down, she examined the chasm, noting an oddity along its worn walls. Patches of ashen discoloration clung to the exposed dirt, forming thin coiling strands of filmy grey that brought to mind long-avoided chores and what inevitably decorated places left abandoned. Plucking a lily from nearby, Natalie reached out and brushed the withered flower against a patch, and as sticky threads clung to the petal, she muttered: “Cobwebs.”
Looking past the plunging roots and abandoned silk, Natalie stared at the darkness below. Again, memories of the original Alukah’s sarcophagus surfaced, and with them came a growing certainty as to what she was looking upon. The Reaper of Sorrows tried to tear Natalie’s mind apart, to flense away her humanity and leave only the curse of Annoch the Binder. Mina’s bravery and Master Time’s blessing helped Natalie slip the spider fiend’s web before she shattered, but not before she cracked. That’s what these fissures in her mindscape and the basalt basin represented: the damage done to her psyche and soul.
An already chilling prospect turned terrifying by Mina’s account. The Priestess had described the Alukah curse as a core of primal darkness buried within its host, kept contained by an outer shell of will, memory, and personality, but still able to act as a malign influence pressing on Natalie’s mind, even threatening to break free when her psyche grew fragile. So if that was the case… then what lay at the bottom of the cracks was the curse in its purest form, just waiting to bubble up and drown the world in seas of red.
As bone-deep terror started to fill Natalie, a question pushed its way past panicked thoughts and made her stop and think. If her soul was cracked and the curse had an easy path to overtake her, then why hadn’t it already? Surely, with her lack of blood and emotional distress, the curse must have enjoyed a plethora of opportunities to take control over the past few days. Yes, she’d been riding the ragged edge of predatory instincts during the fight for Azyge, but Natalie doubted that was what an unleashed Alukah looked like. All she’d learned painted that sort of situation with a distinctly apocalyptic light, not the knife-edge dance close to frenzying she’d experienced.
The answer to this question, or at least Natalie’s best guest seemed obvious the more she stared into the Reaper’s work. Yew roots were drinking deep of the darkness, and judging from how fast the tree was growing, feeding well off the curse. Standing up and looking back at the gnarled object of her curiosity, Natalie considered a few things. The tree had first sprouted when she’d cannibalized Sicar and Roux, an act of initial desperation that had… unusual side effects. Even now, memories of the manic state she’d been in brought a mix of giddy excitement and deep embarrassment. But in the wake of being attacked by the Reaper masquerading as the Rabisu, the fang tree hadn’t occupied many of Natalie’s thoughts. Now, with that parasite pulled from her soul, she wondered if that was part of the Grief Goddess’s scheme.
Master Time warned Natalie against further acts of cannibalism or even coming into physical contact with other vampires, which seemed to have been an attempt to ward off what Wolfgang did to her, as his mind acted like a transmission vector for some of the Reaper’s essence. Empowering the seed first planted by Scapino and then watered by the torment of the two nobles now trapped in the Yew. There were so many layers to these machinations that Natalie couldn’t help but think she’d stumbled onto another one. All her focus and fears were pointed at the supposedly woken Rabisu, with little thought given to the actual souls she’d devoured. Now, the tree born from that particular act seemed to be helping keep the curse contained, which brought to mind a few other disparate facts she’d learned.
The original Alukahs never produced proper scions, instead siring malformed monsters called Edimmus they habitually devoured in an act Glynn’s tomes thought was meant to reclaim the power expended in creating these inadequate offspring. Now, Natalie wasn’t entirely certain this was correct, or at least that it was the whole story. When lesser vampires consumed a mortal, they imbibed a piece of their soul, in an act both empowering and unimaginably pleasurable, well at least that’s what Natalie had been told. Her brush with such a final feeding hadn’t been anything normal, and from what Cole said, his lifeblood only offered a shadow of the usual effect. Actually, the only creatures Natalie had fully devoured outside animals were the two petty nobles, and from what she’d seen of them and the tree, she hadn’t just taken a piece of their souls, but the whole thing. In fact, she’d absorbed not just their souls but every drop of blood in them, filling her cistern with a feast that was only fully expended fighting Wolfgang’s ambush.
All this swirled about in Natalie’s head, her thoughts moving faster and faster as she put together a puzzle with speed Isabelle might find acceptable. Cannibalism among vampires, or ‘molek’ as the missing countess called it, was taboo but not uncommon, with great power and risk associated with the act. Requiring the attacking vampire to utterly overpower their prey and then spend months or even years being haunted by scraps of the consumed. But the power, knowledge, and even bloodline abilities that might be gained from the act made it worth it. All of this led back to a truth that events with Yara had recently hammered home.
Everything about the modern breeds of vampire was a pale shadow of the original curse; their powers, their appetites, and even their very servants were inadequate copies. So wouldn’t it make perfect sense for even molek to be something far greater for the Alukah? Perhaps, where the younger bloodlines saw it as a semi-taboo way to greater power, maybe the original nine used it for a far more insidious purpose. As Natalie thought about it, she started to wonder why was the curse of vampirism even spreadable? The Rabisu becoming a monster of blood and hunger, then seeking to replace her murdered children, meant some kind of sense, but the Edimmus and the later propagation among the younger breeds seemed odd, like an errant thread sticking out of an already complete tapestry. Then, like lightning, these thoughts came together, and Natalie understood.
In a voice husky with surprise, she whispered the truth. “The curse spreads so vampires can devour their scions for power. It’s all the Rabisu’s crime repeated over and over.”
Natalie felt a very heavy weight settle onto her shoulders as the shape of things came into view. “The curse is planted in another soul, grows within them, gathering blood and power until it can be harvested, bringing all it gained along with its essence back to the Alukah. Where it doesn’t just strengthen me but… but helps channel the curse?”
This was harrowing to think about, but the more Natalie stared at the yew tree, and the writhing souls trapped within, the more it made a sick kind of sense. That she’d accidentally perpetuated this behavior, perhaps in a more roundabout way, but still, wasn’t a pleasant thought. However, achieving this fell evolution by bloody coincidence seemed a better option than if her curse was allowed to run rampant. Coincidence... That added another factor to this, if a God had pushed her this way, the question remained which one? Natalie understood she was a favored game-piece in Master Time and the Reaper of Sorrow’s battle over the future, but that didn’t mean she always knew which player was prodding her in a direction.
Considering she’d consumed two souls and kept them from the cycle of death, Natalie found it hard to believe the Tenth God would push for such a development… but having the Baron and Dame within her helped thwart the Reaper’s plans. After everything she’d seen of Master Time, Natalie was under no illusions that the God of Death would hesitate to do something so pragmatic as sacrificing a pair of unrepentant killers to keep his favored monster intact.
Rubbing her face with sudden exhaustion, Natalie realized she was wasting time she didn’t have. A battle raged out in the waking world, and with every dilated moment spent here in the mindscape, she slipped closer to torpor or frenzy. She’d come hoping to pull power from ghoul blood and gotten monumentally sidetracked. Returning to that course, she focused back on her basin, feeling it and her mindscape overlapping. While standing amid red lilies, she touched the smooth basalt and ran a finger through the pool of brown rotten blood. Following the instincts that first guided her on using stolen blood, Natalie tried to empower her weakened flesh with the gorger ghoul’s ichor.
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A wave of nausea, a half-forgotten feeling, passed through Natalie, and she started to groan in pain, a noise that turned to a triumphant shout as the first wellings of energy filled her. That shout died as she realized how paltry the offering was. Ghoul blood carried power, but in such infinitesimal amounts, she’d need a pond of it to regain her full strength, and that was counting how efficient Natalie’s blood savantism made her abilities. In fact, the starving vampire wagered that anyone without her unique heritage wouldn’t be able to gain any power at all, which explained why other leeches didn’t feed upon the dead, well, that and the roiling sickness that went with it. The blood she’d drank was literally rotten, and her body reacted to it like it might spoiled food in life. But, desperate people could eat garbage when starved, and Natalie was certainly that.
Mind flicking between the real, the mental, and the metaphysical, Natalie guzzled down the fetid ichor, spending it fast as she consumed it, trying to wriggle free of the gorger’s bulk. It was slow, wretched, going but she was making progress. Soon, Natalie would be free and then maybe find some fresher ghouls among the horde; perhaps their blood would be less disgusting? But before she could escape the dead gorger, Natalie froze as something brushed against her mind. It was a deep deep desperate hunger, but not her own, or any vampires for that matter. This wasn’t the maddening thirst of her kind, but a ravenous ache married to a vague sense of dull but omnipresent pain. This feeling sat at the edge of Natalie’s awareness defying easy understanding for a solid few seconds before realization struck; she’d formed a psychic link with the ghoul whose blood now filled her.
Surprised she’d not considered this, Natalie reached out through the tenuous bond of stolen blood to the mind trapped within so much rotten flesh. The frayed tatters of whoever the ghoul had been in life offered no resistance to the intrusion, and as the Alukah got a closer inspection of the broken mind it was easy to see why. If a well-prepared mind, trained and warded against psychic attacks was akin to a defended stronghold, while a more common psyche was simply a house with doors and windows the canny could slip through, then the ghoul’s mind was a ruined shack, exposed to the elements and anyone who’d want to stroll in. Not that many would, as what Natalie found inside was horrific.
Dead and rotting as its body was, the soul trapped within a ghoul still perceived the world, albeit in an unfocused, dream-like state. Damaged senses offered malformed interpretations of reality, further garbled by a poorly reanimated brain that knew only base hunger and basic movement. To be a ghoul was to be stuck in a claustrophobic nightmare, unable to do more than starve and suffer. In some twisted way, gazing upon the ghoul’s psyche made Natalie distinctly thankful for her own curse. It seemed being a unique monster with the weight of ages on one’s shoulders was a far better fate than this most common form of undeath.
Slipping deeper, Natalie peered around inside the ghoul. It wasn’t intact enough to have a mindscape, just a collection of worn fragments that her mind continued to interpret as a run-down shack; applying a good metaphor was, afterall, the key to psychic magic. As she glanced around the lean-to, ignoring the flickers of emotion and sensation that wafted off its decaying interior, Natalie’s context shifted and expanded. This hovel wasn’t alone, outside of it were hundreds of similar ruins, all pressing against each other in a dilapidated slum that stretched in every direction she could conceive.
As Natalie watched, the surrounding buildings shifted constantly, pushing against each other in a constant friction that grated on her mind. The sound of wood creaking, stone grinding upon stone, and distinctly organic pops filled Natalie’s perception, accompanied by a pungent aroma of spoiled meat and human waste that waxed and waned with the shifting shacks. All of this combined to give the impression the slum around her was a collection of poorly bound rafts floating atop a sea of filth. Disliking what her metaphor had grown into, Natalie tentatively reached the edge of the gorger’s shack and peered into its neighbor. It was much the same as the first, except marginally smaller and in slightly better condition, a fact emphasized by the ruined firepit at the hut’s center. Smoldering embers lay amid thick ash, and a curious notion struck Natalie. Leaning dow,n she touched the coals, taking advantage of one of Madame Pryia’s lessons.
Fire and light in a mindscape represented consciousness, and with the right prodding, one might catch glimpses of what the invaded mind was doing currently. Shifting the embers, Natalie caught flickers of images in the resulting smoke.
*Gnawing hunger and the scent of warm bodies somewhere close making it worse *
*Dull, unfocused eyes stared blankly at the collection of ghouls before it, all trying to push past a mass of bloated flesh that stalled access to a crack in a stone wall. *
* Grinning corpses clambering up and over them and the fallen gorger, heading into Azyge*
Eyes widening, Natalie looked back to the shack she’d started in with growing understanding. She’d entered another ghoul’s tattered mindscape, passing from one to the other without even realizing it. Stepping out to examine the surrounding slum, Natalie sucked in a breath of surprise, gagging on the stink. This melange of broken shacks was the corpse-tide, the minds of every ghoul rubbing against each other, their undefended minds pressed together into this great mass. Cole had mentioned how necromancers could manipulate large swarms of ghouls, and now Natalie thought she knew how, or at least one of the component aspects.
Before this magical curiosity could lose its novelty, a loud crack and lurch pulled Natalie’s attention. At the edge of the slum, sat a dozen intact buildings, each on tiny islands that slowly drifted closer. They varied between thatch-roofed cottages and brick-walled guard houses, but invariably, they were coming apart as they approached. Paint peeled, stone crumbled, and wood rotted, all at a noticeable speed. Teeth bared, Natalie realized what was happening, these were the tide’s newest victims, the freshly dead who’d yet to reanimate still being pulled into the mass by whatever magics were at work.
Searching frantically around her, Natalie wondered if she could do something to help from here. If a powerful necromancer could steer this ghetto, then maybe she could as well? Reaching out with her mind, Natalie groped at the surrounding shacks, trying to push them, and to her surprise succeeded. A ripple of movement went through the rafts, and they smacked into each other, creaking and groaning in protest but otherwise doing nothing significant. Grimacing, as what little power she’d claimed drained away, Natalie realized she might be able to push around a few ghouls psychically, but her lack of blood and control made anything more complex impossible. She needed more blood and some kind of mechanism, a way to lash the rafts together so her power might be put to better use. But whatever necromantic techniques might make that possible were well beyond Natalie’s skill.
Once again the absence of Isabelle made itself known. She’d know what to do in this situation, she’d have been able to stop the ghouls without ending up in this mess. Of course… if Natalie was being honest with herself, Isabelle would also probably manage to create an entirely different mess, but that was besides the point. Natalie missed her mentor and lover, not just for the practical reasons either. Having Isabelle around could be frustrating but also strangely comforting; she’d been a big part of Natalie’s unlife and… and… Forcing her mind off such moroseness, Natalie tried to focus. She was by herself, and needed to rely on-
Jolting upright, Natalie left the corpse-tide raft with a thought and returned to her own mindscape, standing before the yew tree. She needed necromantic knowledge, particularly the skills to control a swarm of undead, well, they were already in her possession, she just needed to figure out how to access them.
Stepping towards the tree, Natalie grabbed the withered form of Baron Sicar by the throat and pulled him to her face. “You want to parlay? Let’s start with information. Show me how you controlled your army and then we’ll talk”
Sicar’s sunken eyes focused on Natalie, a spark of intellect still present in him. Reaching out with his single exposed hand, the Baron pointed up at the higher branches of the tree he’d fused with. Finger twitching with vamperic starvation he jabbed at something Natalie hadn’t noticed. Hidden among the pale fang needles were black pearls, tiny nubs of glistening darkness that, despite the wrong coloration, were unmistakable. “Yew berries.”
This tree of stolen blood and souls, watered by the unleashed curse, was now bearing fruit. Reaching up, Natalie carefully grabbed one of the laden branches and pulled it down, plucking free three of the obsidian berries. Staring down at them, she muttered. “These are poisonous.”
Considering that for a moment, Natalie realized she was being ridiculous. Toxins that could stop the heart didn’t exactly mean much to a vampire. Still, these weren’t real berries, but a manifestation of something inside her, and the metaphor was plain. The fruit she held was dangerous, the only question was the details of said danger. Rolling the two spheres around in her palm for a moment, Natalie came to her decision, she needed options, and this seemed the best way to get them. Before doubt or hesitation could set in, she downed the berries in a single swallow.
For a moment, nothing happened and then a wave of euphoria crashed into Natalie, a giddy electricity that traveled up her spine and made her legs weak. But this this pleasure came more practical things, like knowledge and awareness. Skin suddenly painfully sensitive, Natalie shuddered as her consciousness expanded. She could feel pieces of foreign memory filling her mind, flashes of arcane practices, rites of reanimation, and spells of control. But this information was slippery, difficult to hold onto, and lacking key context. It was like being back with Isabelle, witnessing her magic and learning from it, but not learning it. The secrets of controlling a corpse-tide were available, but Natalie just couldn’t grasp them.
Frustration burned inside Natalie’s heightened mind, and her fingers tightened around Sicar’s neck, squeezing it down to the spine. “This is useless, I need-”
The sudden rage that exploded out of her annoyance faded as the Alukah realized what she held. Sicar was still intact, staring at her with fearful eyes, in place of his ruined neck, a length of black chain sat in Natalie’s hand. Holding up the dark links, watching them sway, a cruel smile spread across the giddy vampire’s face. When one had better tools, complex rites and practices became superfluous. Sicar and his ilk might need to cast potent spells to bind a swarm to their will, but for the heir of Annoch… well binding lesser beings came naturally.
Leaving her mindscape, entering the raft slum of the ghouls, Natalie willed the chain to grow and split, its new heads crawling out along the ground in every direction like some metallic fungus. Chains spread between the rafts, lashing them together, turning disparate grinding minds into a unified mass, but one the Alukah lacked the strength to steer. Frowning, the Seventh, looked out upon its bound but unbroken servants. The ghouls were driven by potent instincts, getting them to heel would take power, and there wasn’t a lot of that at hand, or… or was there?
Feeling the hundreds of minds bound to her will, the Alukah let its chains slip deeper and deeper into the ghouls. Now she could feel more than their broken minds, she could feel the rotting husks they inhabited, and, more importantly, the stagnant ichor filling dead veins. Gently at first, Natalie pulled on the fetid blood of a ghoul, feeling its initial resistance, but with an effort of spent power, it came free. Somewhere nearby in the physical world, a walking corpse spasmed violently, all the blood left in it drawn out of an exposed wound and slithering along the ground like a massive amoeba. The blood wormed its way beneath the gorger’s bulk and into the waiting Alukah. Fighting down the disgust at the taste, the Seventh squeezed every drop of power it could from the clotted substance and used it to pull on more ghouls.
Soon a dozen corpses worth of blood had reached the Alukah, and she finally freed herself from the gorger. Sucking in a breath of stinking night air, the Vampire smiled madly and kept pulling. Score after score of ghouls popped and gurgled as their unused lifeblood found a better use inside a better breed of monster. Streams of brown tarry fluid ran along the muddy ground, fusing into a growing river that swirled about the Alukah and infused her. She needed a pond's worth of ghoul blood to be battle ready, and well, that wasn’t hard to find.
Some part of Natalie not swept up in this task or the dark joy filling her remembered an old silver-bound tome shared by Hierophant Glynn. In that ancient text were illustrations of the Rabisu’s reign, showing cities worth of people screaming in horror as their blood was drained away in great crimson currents the ur-vampire absorbed. Back then, Natalie thought it an artist’s flourish in depicting massacres, now she knew better.
With a sizable amount of blood back in her cistern, Natalie returned her focus to the slum raft and pulled on the chains, the ghouls bridled at their sudden collar and fought against her, rapidly draining much of the ichor taken from their fellows. Stopping and sighing the Alukah realized she couldn’t control the entire swarm and would need to do this in parts, but then a notion struck her. Letting the chains go slack, she let a new length extend out through the shacks, seeking one ruin in particular. As the chain hunted, the Seventh Alukah turned back to the Azyge’s wall, hoping visual contact would help the search.
It did indeed and as her eyes fell upon the surviving gorger, now pushing its way past towards frantic defenders. Like a striking adder the Alukah’s chains sunk into the rampaging ghoul’s mind. Head cocked to the side, Natalie rummaged through this newest broken-down hovel, deciding it was time to play rough. Cole mentioned necromancers usually struggled to keep ghouls under perfect control so they often found ways to aim walking corpses in subtle ways. Pryia, the devious creature she is, also taught Natalie some very nasty psychic tricks, ones she’d not wanted to learn and never intended to use. But now seemed a good time to mix these two lessons in a rather amusing way.
Reaching into the gorger ghoul, Natalie found its hunger, its primal instinct to seek out living flesh and consume it. Touching this integral part of the gorger, Natalie learned a few interesting things about it. Apparently this breed of undead preferred to consume the digestive organs, an odd metaphysical quirk brought on by its death by deprivation. Pulling that need away like a rotten tooth, the Alukah put something in its place.
The gorger froze instantly, stopping its lumbering advance on the Azyge guards and then turning about. With one bloated hand, it grabbed the nearest grinner, lifting it up and sinking blackened teeth into the thrashing ghoul. Dropping the broken grinner onto the ground the gorger waded into the tide of corpses it had been the vanguard of and started feasting. The stunned defenders could only watch as the monster that should have been their death turned on its fellow with unimaginable gluttony. Taking a moment to admire her brilliance, Natalie sent chains out to the most intact grinners and made similar changes, soon the elite of the corpse tide were tearing away the lesser ghouls like a wolf pack and bear set among lame sheep.
Turning away from this grisly but amusing sight, Natalie stretched her body, sighing at the sheer joy of movement after being trapped. Only then did she realize the mess of gore covering her. Shaking her head in disgust, Natalie knew her armor was ruined, and it would take hours to wash fully. But, that could wait, right now she needed to find her Knight and maybe get the taste of rotten blood out of her mouth, which he’d happily oblige; he was hers afterall. Now, the only question was where did her oh-so-brave but oh-so-foolish lover go?
*BOOM*
Turning in the direction of the explosion, Natalie couldn’t help but laugh; this seemed a good sign as any as where to find Cole. Strutting forward, stepping over corpses, and forcing ghouls to part the way, the Alukah headed towards the blast, a wide hungry smile splitting her face. The black yew berries had tasted wonderful, and the heady power they offered still flowed through Natalie in wondrous waves. It was different from the raw exhilaration born of molek, having a… steadier, more refined flavor; like good wine or the afterglow of great sex. A feeling, she really could get used to.
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