Past of Many

[EloHim]

"- She didnt. Not all people like when others decide to aproach them that directly. People who like their privacy, for example. And yes, some of those shrooms will be used for poison, while others for some not so potent creations that nonetheless will serve the group should the need arise."
Elorit answered to the woman who interjected into their talk. He expected something like this to happen. After all they were not alone in the group.

[EtherealNoire]

Questions whirred about Talea's mind as bloated flies too bitter to be ignored. They pinched her skin and afflicted her until she writhed in anguish. No mercy prevailed.
Distraught, she sank against the oak's blighted flank, and gazed out at the knowledge abandoned. Had it not been for the tree's rugged yet reassuring embrace, familiar from her time spent beneath similar grim shadows, she might have forsaken the journey in trepidation's plight.
Still her gaze strained against Night's, begging his sanction to scry further for the Wight haunting the peculiar light-dweller. Had Night hallowed their meeting, she could not allude his desires.
Drawn as a moth to a lantern's pulsing fire, Talea would find another means to entreat this mortal yet.

[The Carrying Blade]

Mithra looked onward to Talea, then back to Elorit, they were wasting time playing this sheep game of hiding and the night was coming in fast. As much as she praised Higarsa, these vile woods showed even her radiant gaze would be no match for what dwelled in the darkest shadows. She looked to the others in their group, the markswoman, the doctor, two more who had kept themselves silent.

“Enough! We are wasting time like this, do what you must to keep her with us but if needed we will leave her behind... or both of you if it comes to it. I asked a simple question, for we have a mission to do and we have no time for things not having to do with it. Let us move onward.” She said valiantly, irritated but moving forward to their goal. Shaking her head as she turned to the other 2 with a shrug to ‘apologize’ for causing this distraction.

[black379]

There were too many. Adeney rarely ventured from the hamlet with others. Alone, he could move undetected, he could be accountable for himself. But ‘strength in numbers’ had the consequence of indecision, conflict, a divided motivation. Still, the doctor in red credited the group less as a hindrance. The guilt, heavy on his conscience, necessitated that he didn’t travel alone. He needed to focus.

He scarcely kept from reliving Audrey’s death, at his own hands. He had to remind himself that she was alive, no longer that hauntingly enthralling corpse. Yet she was neither the same as before. Adeney regretted leaving her alone again, in the secluded shack in the Hamlet, but his duty to Florence, to Lekalis and Tilly, was incomplete.

His beaked mask peered back to the others, lingering behind past the safety of torchlight. These strangers shared a task, but beyond that were starkly different from himself and each other.

“We must keep together.” He spoke up, his glove waving to beckon the stragglers onward.

[Shinzon]

Aaliyah had kept quiet throughout this whole ordeal, although she often sneered as she observed the interactions between the different members of the expeditions. She did not need words to express her utter contempt for these amateurs: if one of them found their foot horribly maimed by a bear trap, it would perhaps bring a sobering halt to their useless bickering. She was here to do a job, earn herself some money, and potentially get to experiment along the way. Nothing else.

She kept close to Adeney, appreciating his silence. She cared very little for its cause: the simple fact that his face was hidden by a beaked mask was a relief in itself. She wouldn't have to check for signs of panic on someone that had no face. Keeping the crossbow in her hands, she simply gazed at the path ahead of them, her dark eyes looking for any sign of danger.
"Let's just get a move one."

[relentless]

The way ahead would become more ominous as the heroes ventured further into the depths of the weald, and it would become clear that they entered a world of madness, where nature herself was twisted and foul. The trees spoke of deceit, the branches hooked and sharp, the darkness calling and a coldness was apparent in the air. The dawning of the sun would begin to fade, a dying lantern in the sky that would soon be nipped out.

Thankfully the group had gathered a set of provisions, consisting of twelve packs of rations, six torches, and medicinal herbs. Since the distance to the church itself was quite short, there was no need for the caretaker to relinquish too many supplies.

As they drew closer, mist would become apparent in the bushes, between the trees and up ahead. The darkness grew heavier without a torch to light, and deceit wafted in the air around them, the shadows staring them down. But up ahead, a vague silhouette could be seen from those at the front, though it would require straining of the eye to make out what it actually was. Along the way, partially out of the path, a corpse lay in the banking to the side, thorny vines beginning to entangle its broken limbs as a skeletal face lay facing the sky, screaming eternally. It held onto something, but what could it be?

[EloHim]

Elorit, while not the first to look into the face of the Darkness, was still a person plagued with curiosity. So he decided to attend to a corpse on the side of the road, kneeling near it. The visage was scary, the corpse was left unattended. Before searching through his possessions he decided to conduct a miniscule ritual - a few hushed words on the language unknown to most of the group. That was worse than a decent burial but that was better than just passing by.

"...zhok lin yashkardan zhur gen zhok pein. Umbasa. Follow the road to your eternal home, sleeper."- he finished his prayer,getting a small flask of dark paint from his satchel. He got a little bit of paint on his bare index finger and with gentle movements (to not disturb the body) drawn a small symbol on the skull's frontal lobe. Elorit had little hope to the success of his operation, he wasn't a priest. But if there was a chance that spirit was lingering nearby and his prayer granted that spirit at least some semblance of rest... he was willing to do it.


He examined his hands, looking for whatever the body was holding on to.

[black379]

The doctor cocked his head and squinted through the dark lenses of his mask toward the object ahead. But his attention was drawn instead to the corpse, decayed and consumed by the earth. He watched in stunned silence as the Elorit disturbed the dead to perform some ritualistic incantation. Adeney might have chided the other man, for his foolish liturgical chanting and symbol drawing - especially at the risk of disease - but his instinctual dismissal of the religious or occult was usurped. It was unnatural, but Adeney had to remind himself that indeed there were strange forces at work. It was his duty to learn more, for the sake of Florence and her patients, for Audrey, and surely for more tortured souls in the future.

"Are you trying to catch Plague?" He scoffed as he stooped over Elorit, though not too closely. Even if there was something to the ritual, it couldn't be worth fooling with a long-dead corpse. At least not with the proper apparatus.

"What is holding?"

[relentless]

The corpse would release no audible, or obvious response, other than the skull of the befallen man lolling down to the side, jaw drooping in a loose manner. The prayer would work, for a moment, though there was a slight coldness that befell Eloirt after the tips of his fingers. There would be a slight tremor in the ground, a shock pulsing through the dirt, and as soon as the shock wave left, the area that the mark had been painted on caved in on the front of the skull, disappearing into the corpses dome.

Its hands were hard to pry open, rigor mortis preventing whatever was held from seeing light. But after a tug, the corpses skeletal hand would now be held in Eloirts hand, and it clenched a figure made out of oak. It was small, with small details on its head and the shape of its lower form giving the depiction of a little girl. Whoever this was didn't matter now, this corpse would never see them again. After the tug, a speckle of dust fell from the empty eye socket of the skull, and the air would seem forever cold.
===

A flicker of red, mixed with a flurry of cosmic blue, a scream snapped across the wind to those that had the sight to look upon the dead. It was faint, as if it were but the wind playing tricks on the iris, but there were indeed shapes forming into a solid crimson, crackling into reality. The ghost glowed a vibrant red, flickering into a blue, and sporadically becoming more transparent before becoming more visible again.

Hands clasped together, amidst its violent flickering between limbo and the living world, he cried and wailed quietly, forever staring up at the sky. On its ethereal chest, a horrific wound was cast diagonally across its chest, spilling a fog tinted a much darker red out of the wound itself. It didn't seem to acknowledge the heroes, content with crying quietly to the stars to take him away.

[EtherealNoire]

From the silence like a whisper, a mournful song echoed through the wind. Tender as a mother's lullaby, it coiled in the fog, its tendrils cradling each hardened heart till even the trees could no more bear its sorrow. Trembling branches stretched forth to mimic porcelain fingers, pale as death,  extended towards the abode of shadows beyond where none but Talea could glimpse the broken spirit.
Corporal eyes faltered and flickered to behold her passage through the mist, for she brushed past them on wings more spectral than phantoms'. Only grief clung to her cheeks in crystal, dampened beads, thick as the saturated anguish painted in the night.
The spirit mourned. Haunted questions,  pained and tortured, fractured their aria into prayer. An orison for healing to mend wounds that denoted anathema. She would shed her life to end his tears.
Thus she stood amidst the twilight, fraught with heartache, weaving sorrow into song. 

[relentless]

The ghost mourned and mourned, even as Talea approached it paid no attention. The gushing of the unholy fog from the man's chest seemed endless,pulsing with crimson veins across it's black ooze. The spell would twinkle and spark as she contacted the ethereal world, and the cold stopped. Instead, the man's whimpers would be heard by everyone in the party, a forever haunting song of anger and pain.

But the spell would soon click, and in Taleas eyes, the black fog that spilled out would soon turn the cosmic blue that flickered on occasion, and slowly, his soul would soon be recovered. With a dry gasp at the end of a pain filled heaven, the ghost doubled over as the crimson glow flickered out of him. A form of clothing seemed more apparent, the attire of a farmer with wide brimmed straw hat and overalls.

He shivered and coughed, but most interestingly enough, the ghost now turned phantom seemed to stare hard at his bones, his faceless skull, before he whimpered again.

"No... they will come back. They will, they-"
The ghostly farmer stopped himself as he glanced up, before he fully diverted his attention to Talea, standing upright. He seemed irrational and rather onnedge from how he posed himself as he stared the woman down.
"No, no!" He shook a stern finger at each individual, a waft of pale and vibrant blue trailing in the air, "They'll-they'll come for you, the nine they said, they'll come!"
He stated with urgency to the living, his ethereal form seeming to face ever so slowly, his form becoming more and more transparent. Perhaps the potency of his soul was beginning to fade, perhaps it was something else... a matter for another time.

[EloHim]

Elorit smiled, hearing the comment.
"- Trust me, doctor, this dead person will not give me any..."
And then...THAT happened. The Mark crumbled, the bone fracturing into the skull as if someone just hit it with a hammer. And as the frontal lobe collapsed, the walls of alchemist's mind shook. This wasn't supposed to happen. The prayer was to insure a calm passing of the spirit...that was it! No spell, no magic trick...no nothing! And yet, the hole in the skull was clear. He stood up, holding a wooden figure of a girl.
"- This land...the curse is deeper than I could imagine. Tavro, the mark got... rejected, for a lack of a better word. That never happened with any corpse on any other land... I don't understand...why?"
Talea started singing...It felt...calming...soothing...familiar. He didnt now to whom she sang to, but it was nice all the same, until Elorit heard the voice. The fleshless voice. And concentrated, despite the feeling of goosebumps all over his skin, as fear started to settle in.
“The nine...who are the nine?”
But question was pointless. Whoever they were - they are who they came for, probably. Yes, that sounded logical.
Yet alchemist couldn't stop thinking about the mark. The thing under the Hamlet...it was the only thing he could really blame for everything around him… And rejection of the Tavro was meaning only one thing.
The entity was being territorial to the point of paranoia. And in that madness it was willing to wage war on anyone, even beings of its own caliber.

[The Carrying Blade]

The dead should be left alone, looting, destroying, even prayer was something one did not do, but the singing that filled the air, and the apparent ghost of a past man appeared and spoke damnations and omens of darkness. Mithra squinted her eyes at it, sensing the challenge of authority in its voice as it warned them off. Trying to save them from a damnation it so desperately tried to avoid and failed in its life. Sadly Mithra did not fear this warning, it was one those weak willed would accept to run away quickly and placate their failure with an excuse of worthlessness.

She walked forward, past everyone, to where she would be in front of the ghost her stare hardened and her body straight, unafraid of the apparition in front of her.
“Let. Us. Pass. We have the strength, we have the knowledge, your soul, and the rest will be saved, I promise it. Lay yourself to rest old one, let the youth pave this place’s freedom from these so called ‘nine’.” Mithra spoke with utmost confidence, unwavering determination, a mere single phantom would not deny her this glory of closure. She would end his form before she let this happen.

[EtherealNoire]

The mortals' voices spilled like ink across parchment, intrusive to the warnings begged from a soul wrung with sorrow, and Talea recoiled from their plague. Their cries consumed her with war: a war between death and determination, one which had not painted her hands crimson since years to pass.
No! She fled before it, loathed to taste its carnage, but the earth would not allow her passage. Roots ensnared her ankles, and brought her to her knees before the others who wavered behind.

Though her body quailed, she could not fight it. Bloodied faces loomed between her fingers, macabre figures and secrets worn on scarlet lips. They were the call of desolation. The Nine had chained the spirits, but the reaper claimed them all.
She pressed her face against the soil, her lips contorted in a soundless plea. With the hand of Night upon her shoulders, he adjured her.
She would be their retribution.

[black379]

Adeney was taken aback by the harrowing moans in the air, and perhaps more so by the varied and strange reactions of his companions. They questioned, called out, sang, and demanded of some incorporeal entity. The doctor peered past them, looking for some sign of the spirit, but there was none. He only heard the detached and pitiable murmuring from the soul.

He wasn't sure if he believed, at first. It could have been a voice on the wind, some kind of trap. The others in the party were either mad or strangely attuned to such unnatural forces, and Adeney couldn't decide which was worse. If there was a spirit, was it free? Did something hold it there? Did every life become a lost whisper?

"What are you doing??" The doctor swooped in behind Talea and gripped her shoulders, easing her up from the dirt. It seemed these people paid no heed to risk of illness or infection. Their recklessness seemed to explain why the sanitarium was busy at all hours. He was going to have his hands full.