The entire manor had been a relic to ancient heresy, if one were ever to put an image to how religious zealotry would treat knowledge. Massive bookshelves either toppled, burned, broken, torn, or a mixture of the former with a healthy film of oil to further despoil it all. Left to rot, or reduced to ashes. Great woodwork and effigies, once radiant, were now shattered and broken husks to ancient and strange, twisted gods.
The worst part was that Nahul knew, deep inside, that such savagry revealed the nature of this god. The god they called the Frenzied Flame. A power of all consuming violence that sought unity through total eradication. An utter annihilation through fire to the world and all things. It was a terrible thing, and worse, from the details Nahul could recover in the texts scattered about, its worship was less like a vocal worm and more like an actual virus.
It infected through knowledge primarily, though it had other more devious methods. It was poisoned words that allowed this terrible and elritch thing to plant anchors in the mind. What a horrific display of divinity, yet all the fitting in her opinion. Few gods had her trust. Fewer still her respect.
Only a select number, her love.
Her mind trembled across the faded orange brown halls lit dully by an ambient light. Sometimes, it came from old and enchanted candled. Typically, it seemed to be without a source at all, and that troubled her far worse. Her mind had already been compromised, and now her weaker half was sleeping. If it had already dug its roots too deep, she would have to wake up Dutchess while Heiress was healing the mind.
This world would rather have a hateful killer like Nahul, her honesty, her her hate, than Dutchess. All of their theatricality paired with their sadism. It was a small bit of luck that they all shared one soul and, thus, a similar morale compass. Even if the cost of that shared soul had been a little girl's sanity.
Fia had this far been an incredible help, and Nahul felt a kinship with the woman. A respect for the dead and undead, and their plight. Many had wanted to simply be left alone in peace. Others languished and sought freedom. Both were a damned fate in nearly any land they had ever set foot in, and tragically, this had been no different. It was a land that venerated the idea of its heroes, but it's dead often times seemed forgotten.
Her feet tread up the half cracked stairwell, leading to a hanging balcony that oversaw a maze of traps and shelves below. It had been a frustrating thing to overcome, and it left the hateful knight wondering if they had been left behind in that decrepit state by the occupants or by its destroyers in a hurried fervor. Either one had left it to degrade, and this place felt like something everything had tried to forget.
So what was here that kept the land ablaze with the dull thrum of looming frenzy?
"Luna?" Fia called to her as they looked down over the balcony. She held in her flinch as she had grown very used to doing in her lifetime, turning her head to look at Fia with a sideways glance. "What truly... Haunts this place?" She asked with an attempt to hide the quiver in her voice, but her shaking hands revealed her nerves. She was shielded by the black flame's blessing from succumbing, but it was clear the hum of hanging fury was weighing on her.
It felt often in this place like the air itself was a weight upon your soul. Hot and dense, like choking ashes that weren't there yet the ghosts of their dancing embers remained. Every breath was a labor as the air felt like it compelled you to lose thought and focus in unison. It was as intoxicating as it was infuriating.
"I do not know." It was not a lie. It wasn't the entire truth, either. Nahul knew it was frenzy, and she was certain Fia did too, but the question of a source was different. Something other than just ghosts and old, painful memories still lived here. "But it needs to die." She whispered, more than a bit somber. Whatever it was couldn't be in good straits. It was likely in horrible pain, and it likely had been for a very long time if those traps were really meant to keep something in.
"It must?" She sounded even more sorrowful than Nahul. "Even if... it is just a prisoner?" She had a hitch of desperation that made Nahul's chest ache at the sound. Her fingers drummed along the balcony, taking in the stone that likely had been polished once, now was pitted and flaking in pieces along its slightly curved, almost arch like shape.
She thought this over. There was a hopeful moment where she considered purifying whatever was hosting this, but the idea died in the cradle. She didn't have the kind of tools or time to prepare anything that might rip a god out of something, if that even was the situation. She also didn't know spells near half as well as Luna did, nor the books upon books that had been written to do it. If they weren't pressed to end this and find the others, she had considered simply leaving and returning.
She doubted their foe would allow such a useful and swayable pawn to go unnoticed for long, however. Every moment they waited was another moment for Miquella to subsume this entity as well. If they ended the vessel, they had a chance at ending the god while it still lived inside for long enough for it to be sealed down the line when it resurged, but the poor vessel itself was damned. The thought alone made her heart burn with rage. Another prisoner in a cage who asked for none of this forced to die for crimes they never even committed.
"Sadly." Was all she said as they turned and walked into the next room.
Fia followed closely behind as they entered a large and expansive chamber. There had been a small hallway that seemed made of silencing materials between the balcony and this chamber, and it was very easy to tell why. The spacious, barren walls perfectly reverberated the screaming wails of its inhabitant. A poor and wretched thing of a man that sobbed endlessly.
His body was a shriveled husk, so tied to his own skeleton that the very idea of fat seemed to have been lost to him. His face was seemingly stuck in an expression of wretching horror that bled orange blood from eyes and twisted, toothless mouth. He sobbed painfully as his hands gripped the source of his torment, which emerged from his cracked skull between long grayed strands of dead hair that lay scattered along his scalp.
A terribly thick, golden spear was planted through him from the skull to the base of his spine, replacing the latter. It speared put of his ribs in six terribly nasty and twisted branches that seemed as much made of gold as living wood, and it shone with a blinding intensity.
"Poor midra... poor... poor midra..." He sobbed, gripping the painful tool of torture, yet never committing to a tug. He knew he was damned. He knew removal meant the end.
It's why the door had been opened. The attackers had certainly set those traps, but not to keep this wretch in. It was to keep others from finding him.
Nahul quietly drew out her metal blade as its sawed edge lightly whistled through the air. The wretch caught wind and turned, panicking as he wailed. "No! No more pain for poor Midra!" He shouted, leaping towards them in a frenzied rage as he swung and lashed at them, but his attacks her pitiable at the best. Wild flailing limbs from a shriveled corpse too agonized to live, yet too afraid yet to die.
"I am sorry." She whispered, slashing his back between a wild lunge and sending him crashing to the floor. Fia watched on tearfully as Mahul stalked towards him. The poor man gripped onto the shaft buried in his head, his resolve to survive waining.
Nahul tried to grant him mercy before he could make such a choice as she snapped open the gear and swung, clicking the tool again as it snapped back shut around his neck. It bit into his flesh, but it did not run through the golden rod.
"No more... no more..." A radiant pulse blew Nahul back as his hands tightly clutched the branched spear. He let out a terrible wail as Nahul watched in disbelief as the man wrenched the horrible implement from his body.
Skull and all.
What stood up was not the poor wretch any longer, for his life ended in seconds. What stood was a monstrous thing that twisted and stretched Midra's flesh to attempt some form of muscle, but only managed the sinewy replica of a shaped tree's bark that pulsed below with an orange hue beneath burnt grey. His head, searing away in the rush of flames that had ensued, was replaced by a great flaming sphere that blistered the air endlessly with sparkling, flailing embers and flaring trails all around in a strange kind of delicate insanity.
The flames were random, but they had a slow and measured grace that made the insanity almost calming. Nahul bit her own tongue at the very thought, knowing the pull of such madness far too well. It was a tempting thing to just let go.
He held aloft his former shackle in his right hand, raising it as its branches began to close around it like the terrible limbs of a centipede until it resembled a great and mighty lance. Something between the folded shape of rope and the pose and poison of a horse mounted spear. His hand held it with ominous skill.
"Fia, get back!" She barked as she moved between the monster and her dark priest ally. The air had gone from a dull orange biege to bright and vibrant reddish orange with gleaming yellow nearest to the awoken god. Its flames turned every stone and brick to ash that it touched, and the body began to move with an odd and dancerlike grace. In a heartbeat, a twirl turned into a spiraling lunge. Nahul deflected it, barely, off the edge of her cleaver. It left a glowing orange section in the center, so deflection likely was not smart.
Its flames sparked as Nahul danced between bursting gouts of flame. Its head spat them as eagerly as the caldera of a volcano, and twice as frequently. He swung himself with a dark determination that was as silent and balanced as it was utterly unpredictable. It could twist its body in ways Nahul could herself, normally. As of Gravity was just a suggestion it obeyed on a whim, and it disrespected its authority with equal grace to a fish flowing through water.
It swung at Nahul in a wide spinning sweep that turned into a spiraling series of swings. It briefly resembled a ballerina, piroutting as Nahul slid under and slashed at its leg. It bled orange, but it did not flinch. Instead, it swung low on the final arc, strikingnher in the stomach. The hateful knight gripped onto the spear as it impacted, but the force was too great, and she was flung across the chamber with a loud yip and a pained crack against a pillar.
Fia twisted her fingers and finished her incantation. Lengthy it was. Her hands formed a shape like a blossoming, ragged and rotted flower as she shouted in what Luna had taught her to be called Glushtonan, "Blushend tu bluteen!" As she raised her hands.
Painful and sharp blossoms of strange, thorn like structures ripped up suddenly from beneath. They were white and black tendrils, as solid in color as the grim wish-to-be mother could picture, and each resembled a torn shred of paper that pierced upwards in a many headed shape. It resembled, in a small way, a hydra tearing up and biting at the frenzying monster in a shape briefly resembling a flower blossoming, and soon after formed a cage of beyond razor thin blades as it tried to compress the best.
It made a sound Fia could only call a sigh and flexed as its body shattered her thorny creations with ease. The shards fizzled judt before hitting the caster, but she was already prepared. That spell, as flashy as it had been, was a feign. "Verdoitshra." As she finished her true incantation. The first had done ita job. A distraction, but also a means to carve the circle, and said circle erupted in a surge of dark grey and withering black energy. A pillar of decay.
It let out a genuine roar if the billowing of raging, dying flames could be called such, but Fia's great work was not done. "Luna!" She shouted. The pillar of decay bathed the flame is snuffing energy asnits already withered corpse of a body began to gain flakes of ashing dust across its blackened skin.
Nahul had dragged herself up and spat out her newly lost tooth already by the time her deathworn companion had shouted. She charged with a violent fervor, dodging, ducking, dipping, diving, and dodging between the flashing and rampant gouts of fire that seemed even hotter than before and turned stone to ash on contact. She wove under a flailing, sudden sweep as Fia twisted her hands into a crescent over her heart and knelt. Nahul ripped her blade up and across the creature's torso, exposing, if briefly, the throbbing and burning heart within that radiated unwinding madness with each pulse.
Fia closed her eyes and let out the blasphemic prayer. In this moment, she accepted her shift. Her change, of course, is in faith. She had truly worshipped Godwyn, but she had felt something shift. She had felt him moving, returning, and she had begun to wonder if her faoth and duties were better laid in less active hands. The dead would have their champion again soon. Of that, she was sure, yet she felt a loneliness in many ways at night. She felt drawn in the darkness to the darkness. A yearning for the vastness of open night and her gaze that protected all, living and dead, without question.
"Me ti dýnami tou Nyx, xekourasteíte epitélous." She spoke peacefully as a beam of thin black energy, speckled by starlight, speared through Midra after a brief moment. A single black line, like a spear of Night itself, torn through the roof and through his slowly fading heart.
The corpse of Midra let out a alow sigh as its great spear and shackle clattered to the stoney ground, never losing its golden glow. His body leaned back slowly, almost basking in this moment as the flames began to smolder and fade along with its body under the column of the remorseful lady's spell.
Both stood by, watching, as the last shreds of the martyr Midra, smoldered at last to ash. Both spoke a silent prayer for the soul who had suffered so deeply.
For his story was not his to write, and that is truly a tragic ending. A gift of peace was all the two could grant him, as the last remains slowly turned to ashes on stone.