Chapter Two, Divine Mercy

Spring of the 16th year AD, Baba’Yun’s lair

Soft Springtime aromas & the nectarine of blooming flowers transuded the air within & abound Mordaunt’s nostrils as he treads on with sharp pace through the hills & meadows which spread out about Baba’Yun’s once humble hut. His fingers idly traced the runic lettering of Lil’It’s letter, her urgent pressing for him to see their daughter seeping into his pores. Her etchings this round few, but the runes dire: “Love ov stars, father ov the lune! Our moon needs you!”

The primordial mark branded long ago in his skin sensed proximity to its origin. It itched & groaned as he marched to the former witches’ residence. Now a veritable hidden tower of their tiny circle, tucked from coast & thicket; with stone & embrasure where invisible arrows could be notched by few keepers to repel an army of looters. Despite the tender chirping of the birds, who took their song to the heavens in gleeful flight of the season’s arrival, this disheveled Champion heard only the drumming of his heart in wary anticipation of what news Selene’s mother held.

The timing of Lil’It’s envoy could not have been more troublesome. Amid caring for his Estate, his begrudging wife, Portia, and his ‘children’ (the equally ugly Caedus & Callow) of adoptive crest and the grueling grind of ordeals & responsibilities which came with his position. She pled for him to come, abandon all obligations to see their Selene. His spirit churned in apprehension, the back of his brain striking bolts of horrible fears & fanciful visions -of Selene so haggard, pale & unmoving. All his thoughts streamed for her, obscuring any concern for Portia’s chastisement at his disappearance or those fat, red twins he reluctantly inherited and barely managed to feign not loathing.

Approaching the rural yet regal home, the formerly shambling hut of thatch: transformed into a strange marvel of stone, a villa of its own. A testament to the wealth he’d gifted Lil’It to have Selene a proper hearth to dwell. These funds came from his wife’s vast fortune from the mining venture her former husband built under the Vizzar. But given that he had practically been forced into this marriage by Drakkon to bridge the gap between the splintered, but potent, noble families of the Serpent no guilt anchored him. These redistributions, simply reparation for suffering the chains of his service by marriage.

Lil’It waited for him before the threshold. Standing in anxious pose. Sorrow’s maiden was she, in her ebony gown. Beauteous but mournful. She shivered, despite the gleaming sunlight warming the earth. In her left hand she held thin paper exuding herbal scent, another sign to him of ill tidings to come from her lips. Her demeanor so shaken save for those sparse inhalations which burned away the mystic paper, wrestling with the wind in her fingers. Stoking of an herbal cigarette to suppress the woe possessing the woman of woods & witchery.

Goosebumps broiled Mordaunt’s skin as he embraced Lil’It. As much to quell the concern within him as to quiet her unnerve. All the world swirled about, tethered tight to each other’s arms. While he did not love her with the fury & fire of which poets blather in honeyed dialects, that she was the mother of all the world’s purest beauty in their Selene made him forever bound to her in strange, spiritual respect.

Lil’It bestowed grim welcome with bitter breath. “Forgive me for summoning you from so far away, so steeply! I would ne’er dream of disturbing your duties for the distant Lord but… Some black curse hath befallen our poor girl, Mordaunt. Befouls her! She is- is ill- with dire affliction. I wanted to heal her before sending a missive that might worry you over nothing, but she wanes so gravely, so suddenly. Fear takes mine heart, as I fear the gods shall take our blessed one from this world w-without a true chance to bloom. What damnation did we decry upon ourselves that our fate should be so plagued?”

Although her silverish mane veiled Lil’It’s soft, summer eyes, Mordaunt could feel the tide of tears surge. Her vitae shook within the fold of his arms. Deathly silence announced its rule, as that abhorrent unease tingling inside his brain tremored reality. All the birds dropped their melodious tunes, abandoning his ears to the deafening gulf of despair. Drowning out the raging of his inner drum and making the idyllic tapestry of the earth abound wilt into null. He barely noticed words escape his quivering lips when the noise of his voice cut back in. “Speak soundly & with purpose, Lil. I must know all that there is to glean of this ‘curse’ that I might pledge my soul to its lifting. Our Selene is strong. we must be the same for her, evermore so if the hour is as late as you say. What is it?”

She shuddered off their hug and glided over to the door. “Her curse might be that of the same plague which ravaged the southern regions. We toil day & night to find a panacea among all our herbs, remedies & spells but thus far the gods hath turned their sights from our pleas. The Fates left us to watch her wither away in agony. I pray you can help redress her suffering.”

They entered the residence and immediately the truth of her concern found evidence by the innumerable concoctions, cauldrons, bottles & weird flowers assembled about the balmy chamber. There laid upon a silver-sheet bed: Selene, deprived of her youthful vigor by oppressive illness. Black curse stole away all colour from her visage, replaced her velveteen freckles with sickly boils. Her father dashed to her with more speed than any charge ever led. Placed a gentle hand about her brow. Her forehead was onset by heavy perspiration. So far gone that her fluttering eyelids did not allow her to recognize her own father as he cared for her, so swept up by the wicked wings of affliction.

The world’s mass collapsed inside his chest. Collision with gravity strained his breath. His bones quaked foreboding shivers, coiling his spine in horror. His lungs wilted away to mirror his daughter’s deathlike mask. “Please, my silver Light, the Moon for which I shine! Hear me.” Mordaunt cupped his palms about her brow, near scalding, and gently kissed her forehead, not caring about the boils & blemishes that consumed her face. “You are the brightest orb that ever was and will be. I know you will persevere, dear one, for you are most beloved by the gods’ favor! Can you hear me?”

Selene made a whimpering chirp and moaned as her father hugged her. Some spark of life’s fighting flame still danced inside her it seemed for she slowly struggled to bring up her own weary arms around him in their embrace. She made to whisper a response but all that came was a gurgling gasp, a hushed plea for something she could no longer voice. “Shh, my precious one. Do not expend what strength is needed to beat this on me when I know that you love me as I would give all for you. We will break through this long night and see you spread those luminous wings of yours once more. Just hold on…”

Mordaunt shushed her with his finger before drawing paternal kiss on her blistered forehead. Then he turned to her mother. “Have you anything that will help?”

“We are in want of any proper potion. My sister and I conjured our ends, yet she continues to fade. There is this,” she said with shaky song as her talons reached for a bubbling green concoction, “but all this elixir gives is a last resort, a means of easing of her pain-”

Lil’It drooped into his shoulder, wet with siren tears. “It hath afforded her enough time to see her father again, at least. But as sad as it is I believe this is but our last chance to bid her goodbye. She is at the mercy of the gods alone. Perhaps we perform the last rite- “

Mordaunt’s reaction was abrupt & bitter. He shoved the herbalist-matron back. Slamming into shelves a few meters behind, breaking many a vial of her weird containers. The man attempted to reel in his rage, level his tone to cold logic, but still his temper seeped through his barriers of temperance. “Were it not that I do not wish to leave our Selene without her mother, I would present a mortal rebuke on the spot for such insolence & betrayal of our child. How can you be so defeatist, so callous in the face of cruel circumstance?! Nay! Bloody gods above and all dead devils below hear me that I shall save her, somehow!”

He snatched the emerald bottle, pocketed it in his satchel and scooped up Selene in his arms. Marching back towards his steed he carried her and spoke a final declaration. “I will bring her to the Temple. Where you fail the shamans & sages shall succeed in Selene’s salvation. They will summon the sun’s love and lift this blackened curse! The gods will not be so selfish as to take the most beautiful of their seeds from the soil of our earth!”

With that the Champion rode off at brisk pace. His sickly daughter tied to the saddle before him. Lil’It offered one last prayer up to the sky before they disappeared beyond the meadows along arduous trail…

The Temple, a week later

A colosseum of stars enclosed upon Mordaunt as he trekked the mountainous path to Ty-Drasil’s peak. From their distant thrones, carved of the void, the gods themselves spectated this night’s venture with keen glow. He closed his eyes and beseeched their mercy, should they be attentive to his suffering. Praying the starlight to burn through sleep deprived lids & alight hope by spiritual Sight. But no such signal branded his seal. Peering back at the Lords above, the rival Serpent, constellation of Zar’Rion snaked over their starry laurels. Its tongue licked spring, poisoned the tide with belated winter.

Selene, cradled softly in his arms, bobbed along with his rapid pace. The wind wrapped about her tiny frame and groomed her hair, concealing the ghastly taint of disease behind wayward strands as her father gazed with growing concern. The way through the Moribond mountains was tempestuous and murky that desperate evening, as though the grim glare of the stars, those cold spectators, cursed his steps with dismaying doubt. But he would be damned not to make it through for his Selene.

The route to that consecrated Temple of creation could have proved a stony labyrinth to suffocate his hope were it not for the sigils & eternal braziers still tended to along the path. Towards the sacred seat under watchful peaks, all refusing to crumble to entropy or avalanche, remaining stalwart obstructions over the northern horizon, in pursuit of his Divine means, some blessing of that sacred mount, to cure his ailing daughter. His concern for anything but the existential gambit was blockaded. As if those stubborn massifs & tors caging him in to this dogged chase. Perhaps his daughter’s sickness cursed his mind, though no other affect yet of him. Madness burrowed in him across the voyage. Infuriating sprites and impish thought forms manifested from the ichor of exasperation & blame towards himself.

These refractions of his peeling mind spat chastisement, mocking him. “If you’d only brought her in, let her stay close & warm, this shivering spell would not hath befallen her yuletide passage! Her spring blooms with buboes and black rot more befitting the villain, in you, that left her to Malderath’s curse!”

“Alas, here be a ‘champion’ without the vitality to defend the ones he claims close to heart!” Taunted another plague phantom, “Hark how his courage appeared all too late! How he waited too long, idling in false grandeur, to redeem his love & valor! He wilts against futility’s tide!”

This discordant chorus of guilting wraiths kept him company, however. Alongside the frail groans from the bundled girl. She burned against his chest & seared their shared saddle, even as cool rains dampened this hurried journey. No water, no witch’s resilient ice blocks nor noxious elixir availed her draining flame. Foul lethargy stole her from him no matter how tightly he clutched her back to his brace. When she did briefly awake from malign cocoon Selene offered no new insight nor awareness even of her father.

She only screamed. Screamed as well as she could with the rotten syrup set in her throat, oozing over any attempts to match the pain with volume of outcry. Shrill utterances leaked from the child’s stifled voice, scraping against the clusters of disease bubbling in her esophagus. Scared ramblings whose only understandable words had no rhyme, reason nor recognition to reality. Calling for faeries and friends who weren’t there. Crying delirium before falling into afflicted slumber. Yet strangely, as horrible as Selene’s fevered wails were, they brought him some small comfort in knowing that the torpor had not claimed her whole. He still had time for a miracle, though the gap closed quickly. The earth hungered for his hope to fall and fertilize its life from death. Blood flowers to bloom of funeral soil. But he would not give her to the ground that easily. No brigands, courtly obligations & lethal responsibilities, inclement weather, or natural wall could stop him from seeking that holy sign of her healing.

Only the Elder Keeper, she who communes with Fates, Muses and Spirits entwined in her breast, could possibly call upon the greatest of forces to intervene on Selene’s behalf. While his Lord could supposedly perform rites of resurrection and such miracles, Ligeia might have the sympathy & spirit to help. While Drakkon would surely only scorn him or ignore his daughter’s infirmity when besieged of superior need to protect his pride and martial might.

Ascending the steppe to Ty-Drasil steps he found Ligeia’s lair distant from his expectation of a humble shamanic hut. Inverted that presumption in presentation, from modesty to a singular and even warlike majesty: a precariously perched spire that stretched its gray neck over the edge of the cliff. Mordaunt thought that this upscaling may well be the product of paranoiac isolation in this tiny fortress from the many enemies that come with such tremendous responsibility. And he feared then that these traditions of the old tribes he’d forsworn yet unwound the links in his hope.

The sparse sentinels skittering the way fled at his flashing of the star of Imperium. Reaching the door, Selene’s shudders & squeals rose worse with passing minute. He poured the last drop of green brew into her mouth (prying open her jaw). The potion barely managed to dam the flow of disease at all. That it may halt corruption before finding healing seal proved fiction.

“Enter, friend! Come forth, ally of Imperator to your humble host!” Called the crone, as though psychically aware Mordaunt had arrived outside. The door opened and the champion met the shriveled shaman. Her skeletal shape creaking in the chair supporting her. A heavy cane steadied as Ligeia struggled to rise to greet her guest. Her cloudy eyes drew almost instantaneously to the small girl dangling in the man’s arms. Maternal empathy enfolded the dying Selene with wrinkled palm draped over her roasting forehead. Platinum mane became pallid tufts, shaved by prickling sickness. “This is what my sentinels meant by the ‘dire haste’ in which you requested my audience. Now I understand why. This poor girl is afflicted with that black blight sunders quarter harvest of our world. You come seeking a cure?”

“I seek salvation. For her. Be it from you or the gods you speak to. She is my daughter. You are the only one near capable of performing this miracle. My soul is knotted with hers; I beseech you: save us both this eve! I shall give whatever must be made as sacrament or tribute, if only Selene is given a second breath of life!” Mordaunt’s composure disintegrated into ash of rue. Pleading weakness bleating from every pore as he lay his daughter upon the obsidian tablet by braziers. Then his knees squirmed in shudder. Trembling, and tear-wrapped, he collapsed to the stone of Ligeia’s tower, sobbing soul-stringing appeal.

“I shall do what I can, Fury’s Champion. But unless mine eyes are darkened by twilight’s approach, I fear that the gift the gods have to save her from this pit of poison is the mercy of deliverance to their hearth. There is no need to pay me, for this is a matter of spirit & mortality, something only the astral weavers of all human fate - our webbed stage of causality – may grant. If they aid, they may judge what considerable cost…for even miracles come at a price, and a father’s love may only inspire the gods to move so much. We are ever at their mercy.”

Mercy?! Mordaunt spat into the brazier as the shaman turned, over Selene and spoke slim hope. “Nevertheless, I wade in the waters of chance. I shall conduct the Ritual of Revival – but know ‘tis a ceremony worked only thrice in our shared history - to beseech all skyward powers, to bring her from this brink. I implore you to leave us. Pray, go to the scrying stone overlooking Moribond’s expanse. Allow heart’s speech to soar with purpose to the ears of heaven’s kin.”

Mordaunt obeyed. Planted himself on the precipice that overlooked the endless, empty sky. The night winds snared him in spiraling coil, though the rains died a short death. His soul hovered over the rim upon invisible current. For hours innumerable he folded inward in deep prayer, offering up all to the ethereal, if capricious, ocean above. He lost himself to this surreal purgatory, dancing between nihilism & immense faith, unaware of his own chanting whispers nor the discordant wailing of Ligeia. The Elder Shaman’s surprisingly firm voice, possessing the profound aspect that still defined her as a caller of spirits, crooned and cawed. A warbling alchemy of desperate sound. By the time the invocation hollowed out the first glimmers of imminent dawn cracked the astral arena, from where the gods stood witness. Yet the small hours remained. As did the smell of approaching storms.

The baying chorus of the nocturnal roll carried Ligeia’s cawing across the tower. Violet clouds, half-fused with the hues of the aurorae they leeched, took formation to lay siege upon the peak. Mordaunt’s patience dried and his stomach retched for answer. Against the onslaught of unknowing and the imminent splash of heavenly, yet intemperate, sobs and the ghostly gales’ screeching back at Ligeia’s awful chaunting. He heard no cries from his daughter and waited no more to hear any pleas for her on his behalf. Patience beaten back by squall of accursed circumstance (or interlocked, unifying and malicious, causality ordained of fate’s imperceptible scribes) he barged into the Elder’s ritual chamber, eyes agleam with ravenous need.

But that compulsion to see her, that wish of restoration, crashed against ghoulish sight instead. He sank with the anchor dragging all essence to infernal depths. Selene lay still, no longer writhing with spastic bolts of agony. She moved not at all. Her breath summoned away; stolen by Helwind gusts. A pale shroud was drawn over her face and ashen veil prepared.

Ligeia sat in mourning by her side, surrounded by a halo of incense smoke and dying embers of nearby braziers. No stream of air emanated from beneath that funeral pall. “I could not heal her… The gods did not grant me their true Touch, did not reignite her spark of Life… She is gone, Mordaunt. No longer in a place where our hands can reach her.” Real sadness swathed Ligeia, limping over to the girl’s father to offer shrunken hand to his shoulder. “But moon-wax & Andrasil root allowed her a few easy breaths and paces of rest before the final hearth.”

All mirth that been repressed in Mordaunt’s miserable soul receded, seeking after her soul already fled beyond the mortal shore, by grave sail. Frozen, comprehending only half of her apology, she still tried to temper the brunt of woe. “I cannot deign to comprehend the pain this tragedy brings, dear child. But if I might offer some semblance of consolation in this grave hour: allow yourself to respect her journey, her ascension, from this prison of pain.”

Mordaunt’s fist clamped around his emblematic amulet, pulling on it in a dull panic, while devastation of the world barraged his ears. With such force of denial & anger at all – and with himself for allowing this curse to befall his silver moon – he tore his fingertips into the talisman. Then snatched up the ritual tablet, where feckless healing inscription etched. Held with hate & blood, as splinters stabbed into his skin. “The gods… turned their gaze… they ignored a child’s plea – my child! No ‘gods’ worth revering would let the most innocent & brilliant girl in all of human existence perish in insurmountable anguish! Servitude for sake of suffering! Indentured to death & fortune’s malicious flail!”

In a daze he stepped menacingly to Ligeia. His blonde mop, damp with sweat & tears, cast a malevolent shadow upon him which bore into her. His elongated (yet blow crumpled) nose jutted forth farther from his face, as if to accuse the Elder of failure and betrayal. “You too let a child die this day… You too have brought us only snake oil and illusory hope! How dare you preach to me about the gods’ plan! When they and their servant damned my daughter to a death which she did not deserve! I curse you, keeper of lies!”

“Tame your rage, boy!” Ligeia did not slink away from this oozing rage. Having inherited that indomitable Willpower possessed by her martyred predecessor in Gaahl. “You chastise an old woman in late hours. Demand her dare catching blight. Then denounce the Highest and their servants because the Fates do not bend to you? Do not curse the gods so vainly, child! Dither before spitting damnation against they who sculpted you from dust and offered freely the chance of life. Their will is unshakeable, unspeakable. Even if unknowing to us of mortal mind, never are their plans enacted without Purpose or Justice entwined in the binds they weave. Our strife is inevitable, they hath laid it out so. & yet we must persist without our backs breaking or succumbing to baseness & blasphemy. If you allow this black rot to spread throughout your soul, then it is only you who shall be damned!”

Taking another step, he speared death glare at her. “You proclaim my daughter’s agony & end Justice?! If you speak for godly mercy then I shall be without compassion for their ilk and yours!” With bestial growl Mordaunt lunged at the Elder Shaman. Wrangled her by the neck against the farthest wall of her spire. “If you feel this ‘gods’ hearth’ is so enviable why linger on this pitiful rock? Why should I not grant you the same deliverance – the same care – as Selene?!”

Mordaunt released his hold enough for Ligeia to spit out a retort. “See past this torment to the firmament of all… Selene is with them soon, sailing to their astral shores.”

“Gods’ greedily snatching a young flower from their garden that they can keep its withered husk for their petty need?! Nay! She must live on with me – on this earth!”

“Perhaps the gods hath cursed this earth? This rot reeks of our sins which spawned it. The gods damned this world and left us to our own corruptive devises the moment we hailed a pretender – a heretic of false origin enthroned – as Lord! Drakkon is the source of all our suffering and all that which blights our people! Surely you must feel that truth echo in your gut, champion.” For once he let his mercy show, granting Gaahl’s successor a sliver more of breathing room. Room she used to hail her prosecution. “The gods branded you their hero, I see it in your aura. Yet you gave your soul to the man who usurps the sovereignty of the true gods and soils our world with avarice-wrought plots. Can you not see that the plague as the sign of Divine truth? The blight is our penance, they say. A demand from above to awaken to the fact that we upraised a devil on the pedestal of holy power. Instead of honoring their laws we crowned a conman.”

Mordaunt pushed Ligeia back, out from the tower onto outstretched platform. Here, where Mordaunt prayed for hours without answer, she hung by precarious course of the winds. Death drew about her, but she did not quiver in her tone as she admonished her accuser. He could threaten her with violence, but she would not step an inch from the podium of her ideals & dignity. Insulted by this inappropriate bile the brute spewed, unwilling to bend to his deluded standard of ego which compelled him to make demands of the Keeper.

“Horrid penance for terrible crime. Empyrean wrath touched your child because her father was so close to the blasphemer, Drakkon. This is the terror that consumed so many good lives – this horror: the spawn of his reign. The plague was not the first sign, only the one you noticed. I too once thought his cause Just. But tis only illusion, an authority bound solely by lie. The origins of our great conqueror and divider are not so holy.”

Mordaunt loomed over her. His towering wrath taller now than her prison tower. He held the totem, where request of healing was carved, over her head as his impudence lashed her ears. “I sailed the Ruun, scaled Moribond & Elderath to reach you. Yet I find only charlatans; so brash they accuse others and shame the soul of my Selene with insult! I should throw you from this rock where you hide from your fellow swindlers. Let you fly on those wings of faith!”

She refused to step back. No more. Thin frame of withered tree defying winter’s victory. “Killing me would not lift this hex of pestilence. Nor restore your Selene to life. All that you gain from snuffing out what is left of my dwindling flame is further loss. We are only just opening our eyes, allowing ourselves to see what tyranny we allowed.. Yet divided by the shadow of your service and scheming scoundrels among our own here. Shamefully, we are far from lifting this curse, and the crown from the head of the plague-bringer. No successor have I chosen among Elders to become Keeper. Ty-Drasil is temporarily cripple with inaction. A condition not unfamiliar to your Empire. Many yet here wish for my fall. Do not thrash our hope in the face of nature’s worst aspect and mortal claimant over us all, in Death.”

Mordaunt let the shaman speak blasphemy against their Living Lord. Letting his ears soak the acrid rains of truth.

“That Lord waves sign of great sickness! He cursed you!” Ligeia’s elegance was steadfast in her pride. Aura of justification and righteous wisdom in her plea for mercy, not for herself but for generations yet to bloom as the one who, to her, now threatened their chance to one day do as so, roped his fingers about her neck. “The rotten light shining perversion can be cast out and cleansed by purifying sunlight! Only if this temple and those beacons of opportunity, learning and guidance fall not into the shade of mortal vanity. Be not another dread knight of Drakkon! Do not come to represent that same darkness as bygone magisters who mocked your enchained misery. Be unlike our seditious sages, who, mimic Vizzari style inquisitions of if their fellows! Binding them to fear & the temptation of tyranny.”

What iconoclastic inversion of chivalry Mordaunt in him allowed the woman her last grace, to preach her peace. Yet it was no humiliating plea, but a sermon staged of stoic’s resistance. “If you will turn from this madness and look at the scales and the sanctum behind & below, you will see how the distance Primus among his peers builds up antithesis to our legacy. While their monetary master is remote, through gluttonous sway our holy house falls to decadent and hedonic estate bought by his treasures. That conniving Magus Albrecht of fell invention will rally his slithering worms to elect him. And your lord gave us but one decade of peace before the innocent started padding pyres and pits. We must dam up these despots' visions from bewitching more minds here and far, fresh & weathered alike. Otherwise those wretches will desecrate all our living kin and legacy. How would such a worm-eaten world be a gift to your daughter’s ghost?”

“Why should I give a damn? Never mind what is worse for your graceless temple. If your holy seat lacks the zeal to preserve pure spirits from waning let yours be damned!” Mordaunt did not blink any repentance, strangling her thin throat with unfettered hate. “This despicable plane can burn to ash for all I care! I lost the last orb of light & purpose. Only she made me care to become a better man. Without her there is nothing to stake any future on. So, I state this clearly: Sod your ‘pious’ politicking, sod your vain gods & snuff your ‘holy flame’! If I must become a monster to enact vengeance for the evil wrought upon me since birth, then so bloody be it!”

“My – fail-ing – was – not calling out the deception once I knew the truth! A sin you share – with me, champion! We fall – all of us – together…” The crone rallied final flail against this heretical tempest in the man. Her dangling legs kick at him, to send him from the edge. Clamps claw & aged tooth into whatever she could hold of him, skin, or garb. That they would topple together should he pursue that hate and the cliff to this end. To no avail.

This champion, unchained & irate in his blaspheming, slapped away any sense she could further batter him with invocation tablet. “From this moment on I stand in Judgement of myself, alone! I shall Judge the world and all the stains it’s left upon this tired vessel of mine. I am my own monster, a cyclone of Fate! I am the instrument of mine own destiny! O, feckless Keeper! I deem you the first of the diseased faithful to fall to my Justice.”

He howled madly. His chin snapped back, unleashing ugly bout of laughter, as he shoved Ligeia. His hostage spotted unwitting tears wetting her captor's cheeks, scarring them with the sullen swell of denial. This refutation of the world’s madness ruptured the surface of his sanity, taking plunge into deathly declaration. “You lot, the spiritualists & prophets of invisible gods, are even worse than vultures! Such pretense of compassion for those who suffer beneath blind canopy of these ‘gods’ and ‘heavenly’ spirits; whispering in your ears about how they wish for you to live in ever grander retreats and more ostentatious robes! Down you topple, with the rubble of your dubious ‘divine’ delusions! That hath ne’er saved a soul in all this mortal mold’s decades, only filled mass graves with plague-stricken children unsaved by petty prophecies!”

Even before he had spoken this grim conclusion for her fate, Ligeia saw the inevitable coming and readied herself. As best as one could when unexpectedly thrust through death’s threshold. The crone drew in the voice of the wind, siphoning that last cadence of oxygen and air all about their shrine atop that mountain peak which had been her constant cradle in life. Then let out a shrill, soul-splitting curse as only one trained in the throaty cries of the shaman’s calls could emit. Continuing in the till of tides as her frame felt the hammering bane of runic tablet wrenched against her.

The wind at her back defying Mordaunt’s push was not enough to keep her from the fall. Ligeia toppled towards the lethal crags beneath the spire. Whether swallowed up by the sea in its raucous appetite or left bent and broken on one of the many angry crags below, he did not know. Her obscene screaming was stifled swiftly. Save for an echo over the choppy, violet storm, once mere shimmers at edge of the sky, began their frontal assault over the mountains.

Mordaunt could see the purplish shroud of rain on the march over the peaks to conquer the Temple. He seized the tablet which struck down the shaman. Unsheathed dusky blade and carved curse upon it. Blood slipping from his hands, as ink of ire, graving assault against heaven & blistered earth. By those flickering bolts & merciless flood Mordaunt announced them his adversary, manifested in nature itself. He cast the curse into the sea & blade to atmosphere with challenge, infusing all desire for retribution into the tip of the sword, proclaiming to the world:

“Hear me this hour, ye murderous ‘gods’! Be ye apathetic or malicious! I stand forth to challenge the wisdom of the world! To interrogate thy barbarous laws in favor of mine own Judgement! I raise up my sword against false lords and demand reason for this pain! Strike me with an arrow from thine armory or else flee from the path I shall carve! I rise above the beast that I was. No longer a hound of the gods & the empires mankind pisses away. I am reborn of mine own Will. I shall wrestle Thunder & Flame from the God’s torch! Raise myself as claimant to heaven’s throne! A mortal to rule for needs of my kin without mind for godly wants!”

The mountains proved deaf to his shaking shouts of impertinent pride. Though they echoed his boldly blasphemous exclamations from their abyssal bellies. Conjuring through this resonance a ghostly chorale of his temper, repeated dissonantly. As he rejected the gods, spitting his spite at their seats in the sky, the gales abound that windswept peak became as fierce as the frothing venom in his veins.