Outside the walls of Duskvol, beyond the safety of the electric tower, the Deathlands stretch out in every direction. Most city-dwellers don't think about the world past the walls and the railways that connect them. If they do it's simply to shrug and consider it lost. A wasteland of demons, ghosts and worse. But there is still life out there. Small communities. Mining consortiums. It's not just the Void Sea that needs to be scraped to feed the city's appetite.
It's been a few days since the massacre of the Red Sashes. The skies are choked with ravens. Every death that happens in Duskvol is accompanied by two things: the bell and the crow. Every time a body dies in Duskvol a bell rings and a magically imbued crow, a death-raven, is loosed from the citadel to help the Spirit Wardens - Duskvol's spiritual defenders - find and dispose of the body before its spirit rises and haunts the city. But there is chaos in the skies. Harrying the death-ravens, distracting them from their duty, are whole murders of crows. Bodies that were meant for the fire have gone unclaimed and blossomed into restless spirits that now haunt Crow's Foot.
To combat this rise of restless spirits, the Spirit Wardens have empowered one of their order to set up shop in Crow's Foot. In the ruins of the Red Sashes, the bronze-masked Bosk hires out Whispers and other crews to try and contain the spectral threat. The smell of burning bodies permeates the air, but it never seems to be enough. Ghosts and horrors are getting their hooks into Crow's Foot and it's no sure thing that the Spirit Wardens will be enough to hold back the tide.
Amidst all this, the cult receives an invitation to consort with the Crows. Meeting the Crows second-in-command, Bell, they are hired to retrieve a package that was coming into Duskvol from outside the walls. A mining consortium was using an abandoned railway to get three crates to the Crows but they haven't been heard from in days. The Crows want the cult to go out and investigate, especially since taking the Clocktower in the purge they now have an easy way through to the Deathlands.
The crew does their research. Aitrus continues his research on the Clocktower and discovers where the other end of the portal from the tower leads. Nor consults with a wandering demon named Bale, trading the captured spirits of the working class for information about Folly's Line, the abandoned railway and the horror that makes its home where the tracks break. Armed with this information, the crew gear up and step through the tuning fork gate.
They arrive in a church tower of an empty town. The wind howls around them and there is no light in any direction. They make their way as best they can across the wasted hills, trailed by lion-like beasts that can smell their essence on the wind. Aldo does the tracking and Kali keeps them hidden. Aided by the supernatural sight of Nor and Aitrus, they prove able to keep ahead of the beasts. Losing them in river crossings, they come across Folly's Line and travel to where Bale said the horror made its lair.
When they arrive at the sinkhole Aldo tracks to where the shipment went down instead of around the shipment. Unable to make sense of this strange decision, Nor notices that the trees are filled with stone spidery ghost things that whisper encouragements to go down into the hole. Nor banishes the little beasts and Kali descends into the hole where the horror is revealed.
The horror is a white, strange, tumorous spider sac that hangs in the air. Out from its deformed body trail thin jellyfish-like tendrils that connected with twelve bodies, some living, some dead, lying around the shipment. Upon hearing a shift of rock, two of the bodies jerk up, as if pulled up on the string that goes through their body.
The cult descends to negotiate with the horror. To prove their ability, Aldo demolishes the first one that crosses their path with his bone gauntlets. Aitrus steps forward to negotiate. He offers the horror a continual food supply of people in return for the boxes. The horror agrees, tying a tendril around his finger. If he fails to provide the horror with food, the finger will be lost. With that, the crew carries the crate back to the church and through back into Duskvol.
They do not notice the woman who tracks them.
At Duskvol, the cult investigates the contents of the box and discover that each box carries twenty specialty firearms, capable of multiple ammunition that could attack the living and the dead. They argue over what to do with the box and ultimately decide to keep four back and give the rest to Bell. Bell arrives and buys their story about the missing rifles. He doesn't seem to care much that the mining consortium members are dead or know anything about the Ironhook prison escapees who held them up in the sink hole who were also caught up by the horror.
A job well done, the crew splits up again to go about their individual pursuits. Business is booming in Crow's Foot right now. It's a season of ghosts, and plenty of opportunity to get into scrapes before the big battle of the Crows and Lampblacks kicks off in full.
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